Heritage Railways in the Midlands by Simon Elson
For this blog I could just quote from my introduction of ‘Heritage Railways in The Midlands’, but that would be too easy and a bit of a cheat on my part. I need to sell the book on this post rather than introduce it.
So why did I write it? I have always been fascinated by any form of vehicle, trains (obviously), cars, pedal-bikes (yes really!), traction engines, anything with wheels in fact. A few years ago, I started to take my young son on Heritage Railways, by the time he was in his mid-teens I had decided to try and write about some of the ones local to me. I sought out the smaller details among the big stories, for every engine as famous as the Flying Scotsman or Mallard there are dozens still running in preservation, all with a story to tell.
The big railways with multiple stations and up to a dozen different engines to run are great fun, get a rover style ticket and jump on and off trains at the different village towns. While I don’t have favourites out of the railways I covered, I will mention some of the smaller railways I visited for the book.
Rocks by Rail near Oakham, as its name suggests has its origins as a quarry railway. The track isn’t long enough for an engine to pull several carriages, so a different approach is taken. Either a guard’s van is used to travel the three-quarters of a mile of usable track, creating a more unique experience or the public are invited to drive a Diesel Rolls Royce Sentinel for a fiver ‘Driver for a Fiver’ – if interested please check the price is still current and is being offered at the time of your visit. At Rocks by Rail is the cab of Sundew, which was, when operating the largest Drag-Line crane in the world. It was scrapped decades ago but the cab survived is an interactive exhibit is planned for the inside of it. Drag-Line demonstrations are done on various days through the summer using a smaller example. Rocks by Rail also have a registered war memorial in the form of a loco. HL 3865 Singapore was built in 1936 and spent its early working life in the Naval dockyard in Singapore and was captured by the Japanese in 1942. It still has shrapnel damage it sustained in the fighting.
Foxfield Railway near Stoke on Trent has a longer line and runs passenger trains with several coaches. It was however a particular engine that piqued my interest, their No 3 spent its working life less than half a mile away from my childhood home in Burton on Trent, working on the internal railway network of one the many breweries in the town, Marston, Thompson and Evershed. Now restored in its original colours it pulled the carriages we travelled in. A signalman’s chair tells a story about working conditions in the 19th Century. A chair provided for signalmen for use during their twelve-hour shifts was blamed for an accident for making them too comfortable rather than fatigue brought on by the long hours.
Another chapter covers a piece of track that no locomotives will ever run on again. Located at the National Memorial Arboretum near Alrewas in Staffordshire is a length of track that was from the Siam-Burma Railway made famous by the film ‘Bridge on The River Kwai’. I reveal a grim statistic about the number of sleepers used in the original two-hundred and fifty-eight miles of track along with the twenty-five sleepers underneath the recovered lengths of rail.
I spent two summers riding trains and visiting engine sheds, taking photos, I hope these few paragraphs and photos have interested you and that you want to find out more about the railways I visited.
Heritage Railways in the Midlands by Simon Elson is available for purchase now.