This was sent to me today by antiquarian book dealer, Patrick Pollack. It shows an entry in an anonymous cash-book for 1838 where the owner has bought shares in the GWR! So, who could it be? It must be someone with considerable wealth and, of course, this was the year the GWR opened so it […]
It is a huge pleasure to see this group starting up at the northern end of ‘our’ railway, the Glos Warks Railway, for two main reasons. The first one is very personal: when I was 15 and forced to be a member of the school’s cadet force in Dorchester, the only silver lining in what […]
I had a great day at the NRM, travelling up from Bristol, courtesy of Cross Country Trains. It was a bit of a mini adventure to venture into Midland territory and then up onto the Great Northern after so long in the South West. I must get out of my chocolate and cream comfort zone […]
I bought a copy of ‘Beating Beeching’ at W.H. Smith’s the other day. If you haven’t see it, it showcases a number of schemes where reinstatement of railway lines closed by Dr Beeching in the 1960s has already been effective either by independent heritage railways or by local partnerships working with local authorities and Network […]
I notice that the President of the GCR, Mike Gregory, cannot decide what to call his recently purchased 9F, 92214, which until recently was based at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, named ‘Cock of the North’ and lined out in BR black livery. Not entirely authentic, perhaps, but it worked. However, Swindon minded you are, […]
It was all over in 35 seconds. A motley group of folk shuffled together on Keynsham station on a dull grey Saturday afternoon. Some had cameras and others didn’t. You might have thought they were waiting for a train to Bristol. But a Sprinter growled past unnoticed and all eyes were on the far distance, […]
It is inevitable as time marches on that the number of traditional steam age GWR artefacts on the ‘big’ railway is going to decline. There will come a time when there is precious little left out there for heritage railways to salvage and building that authentic heritage look will require everything to be built from […]
We all know 5029 Nunney Castle, a celebrity engine that we are all looking forward to seeing on the mainline again this year. But how many of us know much about the engine that came before it in the sequence: 5028 Llantilio Castle? Relatively unknown and in the shadow of its surviving sister, 5028 became […]
The pictures of the demolition of the line at Dawlish in the storms is quite a shock, even though we know how vulnerable that line is to the weather. It also shows graphically that with more unpredictable weather likely to become the norm in the years to come as our climate changes, the South West […]
This blog is a bit of a requiem for a deceased GWR locomotive. The mortal remains of GWR 2-8-0T No 5227 are now at Didcot and it has, to all intents and purposes, gone to the great western workshop in the sky. Its contribution to preservation is, it appears, to make the ultimate sacrifice in […]