London Rail

Category: Historical

  • Western DMUs on the Metropolitan Line!

    The London Underground’s history has been replete with many instances of main line passenger trains, and freight trains sharing tracks with London Underground’s trains. Bow Road to Upminster, Shoreditch to New Cross and New Cross Gate, Gunnersbury to Richmond, Putney to Wimbledon, Ealing Broadway to High Street Kensington, Kilburn High Road to Watford Junction, Croxley…

  • London’s only tube trains with a forward view!

    Now that the 1938 tube stock’s long era in public service has come to an end with the last examples having bowed out from the Island Line, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the one element of these tube trains no one ever seems to mention. That is the fact…

  • The Southwold Railway #3

    Forty years of dereliction and decay: After closure the line remained derelict for the next twenty years or so. There were moves to reopen it, none of which came to fruition. Most of the route’s track remained until the early forties. The army blew up part of the Blyth bridge thus the line was severed…

  • The Tokyo to Osaka Line: A history #4

    The fourth instalment in this comprehensive series on the origins of the Shinkasen! This covers a series of photographs of the line’s construction between Tokyo and Osaka, with the former and latter stations well represented, as seen during 1963. There’s also some detail about the construction of the New Tanna Tunnel on which work had…

  • Sir Roundlington Lives!

    Sir Roundlington is a name you’ve probably never heard of. He was supposed to be a new TfL mascot, but he didn’t make the cut. Other examples of short-lived mascots include Wilfred the bunny, who failed to make the cut in the 1920s. Sir Roundlington is probably the least well-known, and after being deposed from…

  • Tower Subway gets filmed!

    London’s mysterious Tower Subway, which opened in August 1870 and was the site for the city’s very first tube railway even though that was a small narrow gauge line with just one carriage carrying a few passengers a time under the Thames, has been the subject of curiosity for decades because many spot its circular…

  • BR & LT decimalisation

    This weekend fifty years ago both British Railways and London Transport began a major task in their ticket offices and ticket machines to embrace the pending national conversion from pounds, shillings, pennies, to the new decimal coinage of pounds and pence. The change was effected on 14 February with the rest of the country following…

  • The Tokyo to Osaka Line: A history #3

    The third instalment in this comprehensive series on the origins of the Shinkasen! We begin with the notion the new line would be affectionately named Yume no Chōtokkyū – or the ‘Super Dream Express.’ The older (eg 1930s era) and considerably more popular name which many use – ‘Bullet train’ – didn’t gain world wide…

  • The Southwold Railway #2

    The railway’s route from Southwold to Halesworth: From the station itself the line headed across Southwold common and soon entered the largest cutting on the entire route. This present day view on Google Street shows the start of the cutting itself. Its been a public footpath for the last seventy years or so. This footpath was what…

  • Marylebone station anniversary #3

    From the 1990s to the present day. Pair of 115 DMUs at the station. 1990 possibly. Source: London Reconnections A Class 165 in the early days of its use with a pressed steel DMU visible in the old diesel depot. Source: Twitter. (Note: Tweet is suspended, deleted or made private thus an archived image is…

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