Colne Valley Railway

Castle Hedingham, Essex

Visiting this little line and seeing all the buildings, signal boxes, bridges and other paraphernalia
remembered from the days of steam, I found it difficult to comprehend that when acquired for
restoration in 1974, it was just one mile of overgrown trackbed of the former Colchester, Stour
Valley, Sudbury and Halstead Railway, which closed in 1965. There had never been a station
here, and the track had been lifted shortly after closure.

Everything now on this 20 acre site is 'new' - totally constructed over the last 30 years using
materials and artefacts salvaged from other redundant stations and yards in Essex and further
afield, to present an authentic though fictitious view of the railways so dearly loved and missed
by all who remember them, and a glimpse of times past for anyone born since The "Beeching
Years" which saw a savage reduction of rail services and the end of steam on British Railways.

Above:  Period artefacts on the platforms at Hedingham.  There was never a station on this site, but
this one has been built in the style of the original Halstead station nearby, using materials salvaged
from five other abandoned stations in the area.  Other items such as bridges and signal boxes came
from further afield.  It is, therefore, not a restored railway in the normal sense but a completely new
one, using authentic materials, locomotives and rolling stock from a bygone age.

0-6-0 ex-War Department Locomotive WD190, built by Hunslett of Leeds in 1953. This was the first
locomotive to come to Hedingham and, like everything else on the site, had to be transported by
road as there is no rail connection. It caused a stir locally when it arrived on a low loader, in steam!

A sad sight: Not abandoned but in process of restoration.  This Pacific locomotive,
'Blue Star' built at Eastleigh in 1942 for the Southern Railway, is the largest on the
CVR and will become a static exhibit when restored.

The restored Kent and East Sussex Railway runs from Tenterden, Kent, to Bodiam in Sussex.
Opened in 1900 as The Rother Valley Railway, also known as The Farmers' Line because
of its rural localtion, it later became part of British Railways but closed in 1968.  After many
years of difficult negiotiation it reopened as The Kent and East Sussex Railway, with charitable
status and is run by volunteers. 

It was a favourite day out for me when I lived on the London/Kent border and I saw the line being transformed from bare trackbed overgrown with vegetation, and a few locomotives on need of some restoration, into a fully operational tourist line after 10 hard years of negotiation with British Rail for its purchase and licence to run trains as a tourist service.  My contribution was to design its first stockbook (left) in 1970, for sale in the station bookshop.

Plans to restore the line all the way to its connection with British Rail main line at Robertsbridge
in Sussex had to be abandoned due to the prohibitive cost of rebuilding a number of bridges to
the standards required by law.

Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

Nene Valley Railway

Spitfire Steam Excursion

THE NIGHT MAIL

Travelling Post Offices were withdrawn from service in 2004 but mail
trains have been immortalised in this famous poem by W H Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

W H Auden

Bressingham Steam Museum
Near Diss, Norfolk

Mr Bloom has a wide and varied collection of standard gauge steam locomotives,
some of which I was able to photograph (below) and a representative selection of
royal train coaches, displayed for easy close viewing but too cramped for successful
photography.

The museum is well worth a visit for a family outing but it is just unfortunate that 
these wonderful old locomotives, most so carefully restored, have nowhere to go.

Above:  Locomotives on static display and under restoration.  (Captions to follow).

Below:  A German 2-10-0 'Kriegslok' (War Locomotive) built in in WW2  and used in
occupied Norway, where it was taken over by the state railway after the war and
renamed 'Peer Gynt'.

Taken out of service in the early 1950s and overhauled with the help of NATO funding,
it was stored  in a sealed tunnel for more than 20 years for possible future use and
was purchased by for the Bressignham museum when no longer required.  Now due for
another overhaul, for which the cost would be prohibitive, largely because of the
amount of asbestos it contains, which would  by law have to be removed. It now
remains at Bressingham as a static exhibit which can, however, be hauled out of its
shed for viewing, as seen in my photograph.

"Something for all the Family"

Two of the three narrow gauge railways, and the fairground gallopers at Bressingham