Sam Hewitt

The Perrygrove Railway is approaching its 20th anniversary. With an enthusiastic and experienced young family team at the regulator it looks set fair for the next couple of decades, as Cliff Thomas reports. THE 15in-gauge Perrygrove Railway, near Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, has always been a family-run operation with families at the forefront…

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John Heaton FCILT, rides Britain’s longest passenger journey, which runs from Aberdeen to Penzance – a distance of 776 miles. It is just before 08.00 as an insignificant Class 2 local train shuffles unassumingly into a bay platform at Aberdeen station. To the staff it is simply ‘2A01’ and, to its passengers, simply a humdrum…

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The term biomass will be familiar to many, but what is it, where does it come from, and how is it used? Chris Milner visits Drax power station, the first in the UK to switch to biomass consumption on a large scale, and finds out how rail plays a vital link in the supply chain.…

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It’s 40 years since a cash-strapped British Rail closed what was an alternative rail route between Birmingham and Cheltenham, avoiding the Lickey Incline. Fraser Pithie looks back over the origins of the line, its heyday, its chequered existence post a BR reorganisation, its closure, what happened afterwards, and why demands are now growing for the…

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