Category: Quirky

  • The Southwold Railway

    The Southwold Railway – England’s premier three foot narrow gauge passenger railway! This week its ninety years since the last passenger trains ran. 2019 is also the 140th anniversary of the line’s opening. This somewhat quirky railway was in service for just fifty years, and remained moribund for several decades more. It has left a…

  • By Underground to Shanklin

    This year was the 50th anniversary of the Isle of Wight’s ‘underground’, an anniversary that appears to have been missed! There may have been local celebrations however the news archives at the British Library had nothing on record. Instead the 150th anniversary of the line was celebrated in 2014. The 2016 anniversary of 50 years…

  • If you were due a court appearance in Ennis over a counter claim by the West Clare Railway, simply claiming you had travelled by one of its trains to court and been made late would have earned the judge’s deepest sympathies. That is because the West Clare had a most disreputable image in terms of…

  • Barre’s Sliding Railway

    This is the follow up to the Crystal Palace Gliding Railway feature. Following that demonstration this officially became the Barre Sliding Railway Company. The Sliding Railway Company launched investors’ bonds to show it was a serious contender for inter-urban transit. In order to tempt the US market, a line was proposed in Paris from Place Clichy to La Villette. Four miles long with…

  • Louis-Dominique Girard’s Gliding Railway, in French known as the The Chemin de Fer Glissant (later it was called the Sliding Railway) was an unusual type of train whose origins began in the late 1860s as a test line in the ground of Girard’s home near Paris. It is said Girard developed his patent from somewhat earlier attempts to build a…