The Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway in 1960

In 2014 I travelled on the Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway. After doing so I posted an old video of the lost line from through the streets of Welshpool that once connected the line's Raven Square station with the town's mainline station.

Click on the photo above to go to the BFI site and view film shot in 1960. It shows the whole line, including that abandoned section.

There you will also learn about the man who shot it:

Footage shot by Ion Trant, originally from Dovea Farm, Tipperary, Ireland. He farmed Maesmawr farm, Welshpool (plus the adjoining farm, Cefn Du and a Radnorshire hill farm, Esgairdraenllwyn) with his wife, Janet (nee Lewis). Conscious of a growing gulf between town and country, he welcomed school visits to his farm and created the BBC children’s series "Country Close-Up" (1956-62), featuring his land and children.

Read More

Disused railway stations in Essex

A short but interesting selection. It runs from Blake Hall (once part of the Central Line) to Tollesbury, where my mother's mother's family all came from.

A special word for Ashdon Halt too.

Read More

Leicester Oral History Trail 5: Clock Tower

Plenty of tram-related goodness in the latest episode.

Read More

King's Lynn to Hunstanton in 1968

John Betjeman travelled on this line in 1962.

This colour footage of it was shot six years later - a year before it closed.

Click on the picture to view it on the BFI site.

Read More

Lost lines: Addiscombe and Woodside to Selsdon

Another video from Londonist. This time there are plenty of interesting remains to seek out.

Read More

Six of the Best 591

"This tells you everything you need to know about the desperate, empty campaign being run by a gang of politicians who’ve stepped beyond mere incompetence, and have ended up somewhere truly nasty, surrounded by supporters who love every bit of it." Rupert Myers is damning about the Brexiteers' assault on President Obama.

Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.

"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.

It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.

Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.

The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.

Read More

Great Central Railway - Nottingham

As I blogged a couple of months ago:

At present the Great Central Railway - Nottingham is a bit of a mystery to those of us in Leicestershire. Rather like the Eastern Roman Empire.

To help dispel that mystery, here is a video shot on that line.

It will be a great day when the bridge over the Midland main line is reinstated at Loughborough and the two halves of the line are joined.

Read More

Disused stations in Powys

Time for another one of these videos, I feel.

Enjoy.

Read More

Report of the investigation into the Chilham derailment published

Readers may recall that I was a passenger on a train that was derailed near Chilham in Kent last summer.

I tweeted a photograph from the train and blogged about the experience the next morning, with the result that my name was briefly all over the media.

This Daily Mail article is a good example, though how they discovered my age I do not know.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch report on the derailment has now been published. It says the accident took place at Godmersham, which it did, but for some reason all the reports at the time talked about Chilham.

You can download the whole report from its webpage. The summary says:

At around 21:40 hrs on Sunday 26 July 2015, a passenger train derailed after striking eight cows that had gained access to the railway at Godmersham in Kent, between Wye and Chilham stations. 

There had been a report of a cow on the railway an hour earlier, but a subsequent examination by the driver of the next passing train did not find anything. There were no further reports from other trains that passed before the accident occurred. 

The train involved in the accident was travelling at 69 mph (111 km/h) at the point of impact. There were 67 passengers on board plus three members of staff; no injuries were reported at the time of the accident. 

Because the train’s radio had ceased to work during the accident, the driver ran on foot for about three-quarters of a mile towards an oncoming train, which had been stopped by the signaller, and used its radio to report the accident. 

The accident occurred because the fence had not been maintained so as to restrain cows from breaching it, and because the railway’s response to the earlier report of a cow on the railway side of the fence was insufficient to prevent the accident. 

In addition, the absence of an obstacle deflector on the leading unit of the train made the derailment more likely.

I will admit that, as a railway enthusiast, I found being caught up in this accident a little bit exhilarating.

It wasn't until the next morning that I thought about how dangerous it could have been if we were fouling the other track and a train was coming the other way at just the wrong time. In fact someone I knew died in just such circumstances at Great Heck in 2001.

So a big thank you to the driver, whom I spoke to that evening, for his efforts to keep us safe.

Read More

Wolverhampton Low Level to Birmingham Snow Hill in 1984

A look at the former Great Western main line from Wolverhampton Low Level to Birmingham Snow Hill.

This film was shot in 1984, when the line lay derelict.

Read More

How Sherlock Holmes anticipated Lord Bonkers

A couple of years ago Lord Bonkers reminisced about an incident from the 1920s:

One bright April morning the 11:15 for Northampton Castle left Nottingham London Road Lower Level as usual, but it never reached its destination. It was seen to call at Melton Mowbray North, and there were unconfirmed reports of it reaching Clipston and Oxendon, but one thing is sure: it never arrived in Northampton. 

Extensive searches were undertaken and reports of sightings from as far afield as Bodmin Road and Leeming Bar were followed up, but not a trace of the train or its passengers was ever found.

What I didn't know then was that this is strangely reminiscent of a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle called The Lost Special.

It is not a Sherlock Holmes story, but he surely makes an appearance as the writer of a letter about the affair to The Times.

You can listen to a reading of it by David Schofield on the BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks.

A final thought... Can I be sure that Lord Bonkers was not pulling my leg?

Read More

Mill Hill East to Edgware

Another video about a lost line from Londonist.

Read More

The naming of trains

Spurred by Boaty McBoatface, Ian Jack devoted his Saturday Guardian column to the naming of things:

The naming habit probably reached its zenith between 1920 and 1950, when the four big railway companies produced thousands of steam locomotives that carried brass nameplates, variously honouring army regiments, public schools, battleships, Derby winners, famous shipping lines, country houses, aristocrats, remote colonies, old kings, young princesses and holders of the Victoria Cross. 

No other railway system in the world named nearly as high a proportion of its engines. The brass plates represented what seemed most solid, singular and enduring about British life – and also what was most conservative. 

New ways of travel shrank the tradition of individualising the means of transport. The Spirit of Saint Louis took Charles Lindberg across the Atlantic; the Enola Gray dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – but how many other aircraft are remembered by a name rather than a flight number? The Lusitania sank, flight MH370 vanished, and memory says it was Pan Am 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, rather than a 747 called Clipper Maid of the Seas. 

As to trains, I think I’ve seen one called Penny the Pendolino. Others are named after Thunderbird puppets – Virgil Tracy, Brains, Parker. There’s a lot to be said for plain numbers.

This afternoon I came home from Leicester aboard a train called 'Invest in Nottingham'. He has a point.

I was also reminded of Nicholas Whittaker's Platform Souls - a book that, in a just world, would have done for trainspotting what Fever Pitch did for football.

There he wrote about seeing his first Great Western steam locomotive, Freshford Manor, on the line beside Dudley Zoo:

I underlined the number in my ABC Combine as soon as I got home, and for weeks it was my proudest exhibit. I'd sit staring at it for ages, but the more I looked, the more taunted I felt by its uniqueness; one thin red line in an otherwise unused section of the book. 

What about all those other GWR locomotives with such quintessential English names: Witherstock Hall, Tudor Grange, Cadbury Castle, Hinton Manor? To the bookish child that I was, it conjoured up a weird and wonderful England populated by Agatha Christie colonels, Wodehouse aunts and Elizabethan plotters.

Read More

Disused stations in Somerset

Plenty more of these videos on this blog's Disused Stations label.

Read More

The Line That Never Paid: Memories of the Bishop's Castle Railway

This treasure found on YouTube this evening combines footage of the remains of the Bishop's Castle Railway with the memories of people who remembered it in operation. It closed in 1935.

When was this film shot?

The 'Craven Arms and Stokesay' running in board at the end dates it to before 1974 and the first photo of the station without any buildings, as it appears here, dates from 1972 - see the Disused Stations site.

However, the start of the film shows the Six Bells in the town and it is a Wrekin Brewery pub. A story on the revival of the name says that brewery closed in the early 1960s.

I suspect that that early footage of the town is some years earlier than the footage of Craven Arms station at the end.

Whatever the truth of this, it is a wonderful find.

Read More

The East Lancashire Railway before preservation

Today the East Lancashire Railway is a thriving preserved line - one I should like to visit one day.

This video shows its final days as a British Rail branch line in 1972 and there are also some still photographs of the desolation after it closed.

Read More

Six of the Best 580

"Eric's family hope you can join them for an afternoon to celebrate his life and work at The Royal Institution, 2.00pm on Thursday 30th June 2016. There will be a number of guest speakers, audio visual clips and music, followed by light refreshments." Details of the memorial service for Eric Avebury,

"I wish I'd never decided to work in an immigration detention centre," says an anonymous article on politics.co.uk.

Stephen Williams presents an electoral history of Bristol Liberal Democrats 1973-2016.

"Newsagents reached parts of the population that most booksellers and stationers hadn’t previously: the working class. Newsagents could provide a one-stop shop for working-class autodidacts in the interwar period." Misplacedhabits on the need for a history of newsagents' shops.

"Get Carter was different from all other films in that it somehow ‘belonged’ to the north-east – projecting and validating a tough-but-tender image of the region that chimed with the area’s self-romanticising view of itself." Neil Young on a great film, 45 years on.

Railway Maniac on a little piece of Lincolnshire railway history: the Allington Chord.

Read More

A lost line: GWR to Uxbridge

Another video from Londonist.

Read More

Mary Wollstonecraft's grave at Old St Pancras church

Before I went to Round the Horne I had some time to spend in London.

The first place I went to was Old St Pancras, the little country church that stands in the shadow of the railway station. I was pleased to find it is now open to the public every day.

As it was International Women's Day I sought out the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft. She was buried in the churchyard there along with her husband William Godwin and his second wife.

Her remains were moved by her grandson Percy Florence Shelley to his family tomb in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth,

Read More

Disused railway stations in Kirklees

The Clayton West branch did well to survive until 1983.

I was there on the day the it closed and was even allowed into the signal box.

Read More