Woking is a location I've only ever been to once. It has a very busy service with trains on the main line to Bournemouth and Weymouth as well as the Salisbury and Exeter route. In addition there are suburban trains and the main line electrics down to Portsmouth. I think all the above pictures were taken in about an hour back in 1986. Most in not all of the locos and units featured here no longer exist.
This was Weymouth's old station back in 1983. Weymouth was all diesel back then and still had a lot of steam infrastructure - this was the country terminus of Britain's last steam worked main line of course, steam ending in 1967. There were trains from Waterloo running as diesel push pull from Bournemouth, and also a sparse service on the Castle Cary route. There was still at this time a service on the Weymouth Tramway. I never quite got used to the sight of a class 33 pulling a long train through the narrow streets - despite this being commonplace in Switzerland, my other main stamping ground back then.
I've had a long and unusual relationship with the Selsey Tramway!
I first discovered it through a library book showing the loco 'Ringing Rock' on Selsey Shed, so determined to find out more. Amazingly my next door neighbour in Littlehampton had travelled regularly on the line (she was in her nineties in the early 70s!).
It opened in 1897 and closed in 1935. It was probably the most ramshackle of all the Colonel Stephens lines.
In about 1970 I cycled to it from home, around a 30 mile round trip. We reached the embankment at Sidlesham but couldn't really discover many remains.
I made a few trips later and took some photos particularly of the surviving platform at Hunston (which may well still be there) and of the surviving abutment of the swingbridge over the Chichester Canal. (These will doubtless appear in many years time when I get round to scanning them!)
It was disused routes like this that really got me into railways. Perhaps it was just their accessibility, or the sense of melancholy. Funny that forty years on I'm busy trying to get routes back!
In fact in the late nineties, when I lived at Bosham, I wrote a letter to the local paper reacting to a news story about the terrible congestion on the Chichester-Selsey road. Even then it was obvious how things were going to go, and I suggested that reopening the tramway would be a much better idea. Oddly the same paper ran an article - the same week! - about a group planning to reopen the line! I got actively involved with this group, quickly becoming vice chair, but I then moved to Wiltshire and I think the group just drifted. Perhaps it was just a decade or two ahead of its time. The line would be easy to restore as the landscape is completely flat and there's been no development of any consequence on the route. This is the sort of line that will thrive after Peak Oil, though this route is at risk of sea level rise.
The Rail Thing is still busy buying up negatives of a wide range of railway items. These two were both taken in the year I was born, in Derby. Eventually the aim is that we will provide a full service for railway revival and heritage projects, and that quality photographic prints of all these subjects will be available.
Following on from Abby's picture of Liskeard yesterday, here are some 1972 shots I took on the branch.
This line is very scenic and also extremely useful, although the strange junction arrangements at both Liskeard and Coombe Junction did lead the GWR to propose an alternative branch line in the 30s, which fortunately never happened!
The line is now VERY busy and getting busier every year. Cornwall held on to a few of its branches - Falmouth, Newquay, Looe and St Ives, but sadly some lines which really should not have closed - and are DESPERATELY needed now - still remain closed. Helston is bringing its line back bit by bit, and the Bodmin Railway is getting closer to Padstow, Fowey has a freight line only but Bude is still about 30 miles from the nearest railhead and Newquay's other branch, which served lots of Cornish villages, remains closed.
Nice to see I'm starting to have an influence on my two stepdaughters! They've both posted rail shots to Facebook today, and both from locations I've visited and photographed.
Liskeard looks hardly different from when I photographed it back in 1972, though the mock WR sign is a new feature. And Blackpool is, at last, starting to update its tram fleet with some fantastic new vehicles, which I believe they're going to roll out a couplke a month.
East Grinstead will soon have trains to the south again once the Bluebell Railway finally gets through Imberhorne. Back in 1977 the dream of steam returning to East Grinstead would have been an impossible one, which just shows how much progress has been made in the last 34 years!
Of course back in 1977 rail was on the defensive, you couldn't even be sure that East Grinstead would survive, beoing on a dieselised and truncated route. Once East Grinstead had lines to all four points of the compass, by 1977 you could only go north. Soon you'll be able to head south again, and no doubt eventually east and west as well as the Three Bridges to Eridge route returns to the map. The 1967 closure of the route which gave access to Gatwick Airport and Tunbridge Wells was particularly short sighted!
East Grinstead originally had both an upper and lower station - the lower station is the one that survives. Hopefully future developments will allow all trains to use this lower station to make interchange easier.
Once trains start to operate southwards of East Grinstead how long before the pressure builds on the Bluebell to restore the Sheffield Park to Lewes line? This would give the Bluebell a genuine purpose again as well as allow it to tap into tourist traffic from Brighton and Eastbourne. Okay, so today a lot of people visit the line by car or bus, but these options will disappear altogether over the next few decades. And with the Bluebell also owning the Ardingly route they are setting themselves up nicely for THREE eventual Network connections, surely assuring them of a future role in an energy constrained world?
