London Rail

Category: Narrow Gauge

  • A revisionist Surrey Iron Railway?

    2026 is the 180th anniversary of the closure of one of the world’s earliest public railways. It wasn’t a passenger carrying railway however. The Surrey Iron Railway was officially closed on 31st August 1846. Its traffic had been considerably low for at least two decades prior to that date and in the final years there…

  • Blatten and the Swiss railway

    The picturesque upper Lötschental is where the recent calamity involving the village of Blatten occurred. It is a disaster of gigantic proportions and the huge avalanche and mud slide from the Birch glacier has buried the village to a depths of between 50 and 200 metres. That’s pretty deep if one thinks about it. Fifty…

  • 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…

  • The Opicina tram – an update

    The Opicina tram in Northern Italy, the world’s only tramway of its kind, has been shut nearly 5 years. Following an accident on Via Commerciale between Trieste and Opicina in August 2016, it was forced to close. The line was meant to reopen in March 2020 but then came the COVID pandemic. The last time…

  • 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 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…

  • The County Donegal Railways #3

    The third part of the CDRJC feature covering the line’s closure and what can be seen of the railway today. The County Donegal Railways closes The end of the CDRJC. December 1959 notice announcing the system’s closure on 31st December 1959. Source: Twitter Although the closure notice implies all freight services were to finish at…

  • The County Donegal Railways #2

    This is part two of the tribute to the famed County Donegal narrow gauge railways which closed on the very last day of 1959. In the first part we took a look at the CDRJC’s route to Ballyshannon and Killybegs. In this second part we look at the CDRJC’s other stations including Derry and Letterkenny,…

  • The County Donegal Railways

    Sixty years ago this week the last passenger trains rain on the County Donegal Railways. Its popular knowledge the last public trains bowed out on December 31st 1959, but what is less known is the railway continued solely as a regular freight operation for a further five weeks or so. Which means, like several other…

  • The Blue Train

    Britain’s newest train, can be said to be ‘blue in the face’ because its had so many mishaps, its had a considerably poor showing ever since its launch in April 2019. Its ultra-modern coaches and ultra modern interiors with all its mod cons including shoe cleaners, sofas and so on were launched to great fanfare.…

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