It’s a bit of a weird one this. I suppose I have a passing interest in railways based on dog walking along an old track bed near my then home. I then found an old tunnel emerging from halfway up a hill (leading to finding relics from the demolished viaduct that once sat at its portal). This lead to an interest in the disused stations still around the country and looking into the history of various lines. It’s always fun to find a bit of history left behind when the lines were lifted. We took our 9 year old nephew for an explore around an old tunnel on the Scarborough-Whitby line and he adored it, turning up the next time we saw him with a bunch of books on Beeching he’d borrowed from the library.
I definitely don’t fit into the trainspotter model but I have seen first hand the volumes of (usually men) hanging around with digital SLR’s on platforms in York waiting for an unusual train to roll through. The popularity of Francis Bourgeois is also a big oddity to me although oddly entertaining. I work on the railway (it is just a job to me though) and when we had the autumn treatment train coming through, even on my semi rural line there were daily people out with their cameras.
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It can be interesting though, usually stuff stays in situ either due to it being owned by Network Rail and they've decided to do nothing with the land after it becoming obsolete, or various signalling/track being too expensive to dig up.
When I was in York there was a network of cycle/foot paths where the branch lines used to be. They were good.
The fact you know what a class 37 is (I had to google it) suggests otherwise.
I live near the old Great Central Main Line - so as much as I love the atmosphere of old abandoned railways and so on - the staggering quality of the abandoned infrastructure makes me hopping mad at the stupidity of ever abandoning it.
A lot of railways are like that. I live within a mile of the old Northampton-Peterborough railway, which follows the A45/A605, one of the most hideously over-busy roads in the Midlands and would be a huge asset if it had never been ripped up. Sadly, it was ripped up, and the cost to re-open it would be prohibitive.
That's what really gets to me is it would have been trivially easy to have stopped running trains up the lines and protected them... instead, because Beeching's crooked boss Marples owned shares in a road building company, they were all willfully destroyed.
Side note, anyone else write railway ghost stories?
I'm more of a Class 47 man, for me a 47 in Network South East colours, and a 37 in Swallow livery.
I also love class 90s - they look like puppies.
One of my favourite noted things on a recent trip on the ECML is they are now running Intercity 225 sets in almost-original livery, as they are slowly replaced with the new trains.
When running a layout - they will often run a compressed version of a real timetable for the line being "modelled".
I'm kinda wanting a line running round my garden - but sadly that is more than a trivial engineering challenge... might just have to be a little train set under the car port!
Of course the Signalman has that wonderful TV version as part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas strand (where you can find it today from the BFI).
Abandoned railways scare the crap out of me, of course exploring them can be hazardous as well - so doing it alone is unwise.
You can find videos on YT of people breaking in and bashing disused tunnels by themselves - which strikes me as deeply stupid - as break a leg in a damaged drainage ditch, or worse, and there won't be any phone signal to call for help.
Anyone with an interest in internal combustion engines can't help but get a tingle when seeing the deltic motors they used in the early diesel locomotives. Similarly a genuine 1970s 100W amp (they built 'em proper in them days). Age tends to imbue value to things for no other reason than simple longevity.
I've seen similar things with echoes of the past and been quite dumbstruck ;
I've seen an old Galleon/Pirate ship under full sail against a sun set in the Caribbean (probably a tourist trap cruise ) but it looked incredible....
also seen a long Camel train in the desert and some festival in France with Medieval re-enactment ......about 500 Knights in full armour Horseback parade .....the clatter of armour and smell of horses ,pounding of hooves like rolling thuinder ;makes you realise what it must have been like to be an infantryman /pikeman lined up against a heavy cavalry charge 500 years ago.
Incredibly noisy smokey thing - but very impressive!
I'm glad someone brought the subject up.
You could say that I was chuffed.