Category: Historical

  • Pontcysyllte aqueduct chaos!

    View of the aqueduct taken in 2004 by the author. This, the featured image, is taken from the same position where the narrowboat photos for the AI generated videos were shot – as discussed below. When the canals have so many problems such as breaches and the likes, like the massive breach on the Bridgewater…

  • The Scole Railway

    The Scole Railway is one of Britain’s most obscure lines. It was a system built to serve farmland and market gardens. Passengers were never carried. The Scole Railway is considered one of the pioneer systems built for the specific purpose of serving farms and agriculture. The system connected with the main Great Eastern line at…

  • A Tower Subway memo

    A London Inheritance published a post detailing the Tower Subway and also implied the southern end of the subway happened to be a mystery because it could not be ascertained whether the modern structure behind the Unicorn Theatre in Vine Lane was indeed its southern end. Its not its original southern end however the tunnel…

  • Here’s the latest on the Bridgewater canal’s woes as work to repair/rebuild the disastrous breach at Dunham Massey gets underway! Having now done this fifth instalment on the Bridgewater – it somehow feels like I’m Ryan the Ride Mechanic! Instead of discussing the engineering problems of theme park rides (of which a few have been…

  • One might have thought Yup its Pompeii! Celebrating Rail 2000 had been written in jest, for there are no railways to be found two thousands years ago – and yet in that article there were a couple of illustrations depicting steam trains within the Pompeii landscape! There’s every possibility people thought this was a joke…

  • In writing about railways and canal tunnels one might perhaps wonder why railways and canals in general are not the subject of discussion – apart from the Railway and Canal Historical Society who have existed since the 1950s with the aim of bringing history and topics on both together. There’s no doubt railways were substantially…

  • This fourth instalment is three months on from the previous. Perhaps the biggest news so far is the Bridgewater company has given what seems a possibly optimistic date for re-opening the canal. On the 17th April their Facebook page announced a date of December 2026. Its quite optimistic given the scale of the breach, especially…

  • Back in 2019 a feature on runway tube trains was featured. One of the posts published had a short section about a runaway train on the Island line. Despite the incident being mentioned in at least two rail magazines (one of which the author has a copy) it seemed absolutely nothing was mentioned in the…

  • This is part two of the railways and canal tunnels feature. Whilst it was suggested one of the earliest contractors railways had occurred during the mid 1780s as suggested in part one of this feature, the fullest history is incomplete there in terms of railway chronology – and that is because the next railway/canal combo…

  • A famed British Rail ship that’s for sale? Erm, which one was this then? Well it was one that stood right by water but it was also one that never floated! The last ‘captain’ of the said ‘ship’ had been one who owned a world-wide business concern that included a privatised yet highly reputable railway…