Recent content by 181

About 18 months ago we took several bags of magazines to the Aln Valley Railway at Alnwick after it became apparent that my uncle's move to a care home had become permanent. They were grateful to have them, but I had made sure to e-mail beforehand to make sure that this would be the case. I'd...

My memory is that it was a 2-car slam-door unit of some kind, although I don't remember that leg as clearly as some other parts of the day (I'm still certain that I went to Byfleet and NH and not Weybridge, though). Perhaps it was a 2-HAP, or maybe I've just conflated it with earlier journeys on...

(Reply about the Chertsey-Woking service posted in this thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/why-does-the-weybridge-waterloo-service-have-to-wait-at-virginia-water.288662/).

(The first three of the above quotes are from this thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/what-was-train-travel-like-between-surrey-and-london-in-1993.288643/, but I'm replying here as this discussion isn't relevant to the question asked by the OP of that thread). My recollection is that...

According to The '4-Sub' Story (Bryan Rayner and David Brown, 1983), some 4-SUBs were reformed without compartment carriages after withdrawals following service cuts in 1976 freed up saloon carriages, and the same was done with most of the surviving units following further withdrawals after the...

Is that better than the M11? It's nearer the city centre (where inbound passengers are likely to want to go), but very much towards one side of the built-up area, on the side which mean that from much of the city people going to London have to travel some distance in the wrong direction to get...

This probably doesn't break any records, but I've seen the smoke of the Jacobite near Arisaig from the summit of Rois-Bheinn (about 8 miles), and trains on the WCML near Shap from Kidsty Pike above Haweswater (about 7.5 miles). The latter was probably with binoculars (or a monocular), but I may...

I also thought of Appleford; there's some information about it here: https://abcrailwayguide.uk/appleford-private-level-crossing-oxfordshire Although it's private for motor vehicles, the OS map indicates that the route across it is a Road Used as a Public Path; some Googling indicates that that...

On the afternoon of the day of after the Clapham Junction accident in 1988 I travelled from Clapham Junction to Wimbledon (via Balham) in a Gatwick Express set (class 73 + Mk2s + converted 2-HAP driving vehicle). I didn't travel on this one, but sometime in the late 1980s I saw the preserved...

You can take an unreserved bike on either route if you use stopping trains, although there are of course trade-offs. From Banbury the time penalty isn't too bad (about 28 minutes compared to about 17) but the trains aren't very frequent; I'd guess it might work if the train times fit your...

In the opening pages of The End of the Line (1955), Bryan Morgan suggests that the appeal of railways may be to do with the contrast between 'the romantic appeal of a moving train and the classic discipline which it observes', and that 'there is a tendency...for British railway enthusiasm to be...

Austro-Hungarian may not be far off the mark, though. I seem to remember reading somewhere that those Chinese narrow gauge locomotives were based on the Polish Px48 class (there's certainly a noticeable resemblance), which in turn was based on a pre-war design that may well have had...

Indeed, although it does make some kind of sense -- Streatley is a large-ish village, separated from Goring only by the width of the Thames, and not far from the station (which is in Goring), whereas Moulsford is much smaller than Cholsey and not particularly near the station

Crianlarich has one. (I don't mean in the currently closed tea room -- there's one in the separate building that also includes a waiting room. In view of the OP's first sentence mentioning 'station facilities' and not just toilets, the waiting room may itself be of interest).

So you get one set of fares from the operator's website (I understand that many Citylink services are actually run by other companies, but Citylink is the entity that they are advertised under), and cheaper fares if you go to a website which doesn't list the route in question...