Latest News

New Meridian TV Series Scheduled for Broadcast. We are delighted to report that the long-awaited series, 'Along These Lines', featuring eight old railways in the south on England, went on air from Sunday 13 April. Click here for transmission details and here for the official website which supports the series.

Threat to Bath-Bristol Railway Path Lifted? We are pleased to report that Bristol City Council seems to have abandoned its plans to turn the Bristol end of this immensely popular rail trail, built by Sustrans in the late 1970s, into a guided busway. Click here for the latest news. Sustrans is now exploring ways of putting this path into 'trust' in order to prevent this type of thing happening again. If successful, this could provide a blueprint for protecting other railway paths.

New Railway Paths in Wales. Member Bob Morgan has just supplied details of two new railway paths in Ceredigion. Previously, we had reported on the proposals for these routes, but now they are open. Click here for further details.

Site Updates. The webmaster has just added five new batches of photographs (groups 19 to 23) to the Photo Gallery in a belated attempt to catch up with a huge backlog. Still more photographs are waiting to be uploaded, but click here to check out the new additions. He has also completed the News 2007 page, set up the News 2008 page, and done some general tidying up here on the Home Page. Finally, a reminder for club members – don't forget to take a look at our online gazetteer, which is expanding steadily. The sections on England, Ireland and Scotland are now fully up to date, although we expect to find some extra routes when, later in the year, we start asking local authorities to check their entries.

Sustrans' Connect2 Project Wins National Vote! We are delighted to report that Sustrans' Connect2 project won the 'People's £50 Million' in early December, gaining 42% of the overall vote. Huge amounts of research and planning have already been completed, so work can start in earnest from January 2008. In the meantime, we have left the link here in place, since it contains further details of Connect2, including a list of those projects which involve the re-use of old railway infrastructure. Connect2 will bridge significant gaps in 79 communities throughout Great Britain with safe, traffic-free routes. It was the only project in the final shortlist of four which offered significant benefits for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

New TV Series Commissioned by the BBC. Now that Meridian's series, 'Along These Lines', is nearing completion, we have received news that the BBC will be making a six-part series during 2008 about the Beeching closures, focussing specifically on Beeching-closed lines which can now be walked or cycled. Further details will be announced as we receive them.

Meet the President. No, not that president - Railway Ramblers' president! The David Shepherd Foundation will be at the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway on the weekend of 12th and 13th April 2008, with David Shepherd himself giving a talk in the restaurant at Toddington station on the Saturday evening. Black Prince – one of the locomotives saved by David from the cutter's torch in the 1960s – will be in steam as well. This is an excellent opportunity to meet the man who has been our President since 1982; further details will be published in the February 2008 magazine.

New Brochure Ready. 5,000 copies of the club's new brochure have been delivered to our membership secretary, in case next year's television series on old railways (see next item) creates a lot of interest in the club. Click here to access the electronic version. Note that the brochure is in PDF form, so you will need Adobe Reader, which can be downloaded here.

New TV Series Commissioned by Meridian. Meridian Television, which is ITV1 from east Dorset to Kent, has commissioned a series of eight half hour programmes on the disused railways of south and south east England, to be called 'Along These Lines'. Filming took place in summer and autumn 2007, with screening scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Sundays from April 2008. (This is actually a much better 'slot' the weekday evening one previously allocated.) The lines to be featured are:

• The Meon Valley Railway (Hampshire)
• The Somerset & Dorset Railway (the Dorset end)
• Paddock Wood to Hawkhurst (Kent)
• The Longmoor Military Railway (Hampshire)
• The Sprat & Winkle Line (Romsey to Andover, Hampshire)
• The Kent Coalfield Network (The East Kent Railway at Shepherdswell and beyond)
• Castleman's Corkscrew (Brockenhurst to Hamworthy via Ringwood, Hampshire/Dorset)
• The Isle of Wight

Updates to this story will be posted first on our message board (click here), since that is the quickest and easiest way to publish breaking news.

Want to Walk or Cycle Into Bath via the Somerset & Dorset Railway? It's on its way! As you may have read above, in December 2007 Sustrans won the competition for 'The People's £50 Million' with its 'Connect2' project, which includes a scheme to re-open the old S&D from Midford to Bath. This provides for opening up both Combe Down and Devonshire Tunnels, which will have street lighting installed. The result will be of great value to residents in the Midford area, since it will make Bath accessible via a level 4 mile route instead of a very hilly 7 mile route. The project, known as 'Two Tunnels', will also support long term plans to develop the S&D as a cross-country cycling route between Bath and Bournemouth.

Viaducts, Viaducts! Two viaducts now carry plaques commemorating the contribution of Railway Ramblers to important restoration projects. These are at Midford in Somerset, and Haltwhistle in Northumberland. This is a tremendous achievement for the club, and an endorsement of the decision to set up a 'Footpath Fund' to help finance projects like this at a time (1983 or thereabouts) when a few doubters reckoned that it wasn't worth bothering with. So, many thanks to all those who have supported the Footpath Fund over the years – what a difference we've made! Click here for further details.

Message Board. We have just added a message board to our website, which you can try out by clicking here. Since the majority of message boards soon fill up with utter rubbish, only authorised users will be allowed to make posts to our message board, i.e. area organisers, walk leaders, committee members, etc. The purpose of the message board is to provide a place on the Internet where members can check quickly for last minute changes, e.g. to local walks, and breaking news. If you wish to be added to the list of authorised users, please contact the Webmaster using the details published in the 'Railway Ramblings' magazine. We are sorry if this seems a bit restrictive, but just try out a sample of other people's message boards and you will see the type of thing that we are trying to avoid.

Minutes. The minutes of the 2007 AGM, held at Carnforth in June, have been uploaded in place of the previous report. Click here to view these, or use the navigation bar above.

'On Tour'. We don't yet have the resources to present a virtual tour of one of the country's old railway lines, but we have added a new page which gives a flavour of one of our occasional special events. For added interest, we have based this on a recent visit to sites on the former Somerset & Dorset Railway between Templecombe and Blandford Forum. Click here to take a look.

Search and Site Map. We have added a new page which contains our site search and site map features; click here to try them out.

Access. We have added an informative new page which contains guidance on which old railways can and cannot be walked, as well as a brief history of how we lost our railways, and how some came to survive as walks and cycle trails. This page also includes a link to our Non-Trespass policy.

The Cross-Somerset Trail. This is nowhere near as advanced as the North Dorset Trailway (see below), but local groups supported by Somerset County Council and Sustrans Ltd, the Bristol-based cycle path builder, are looking very seriously at how the county's old railways between Yatton and Frome could be used for a cross-Somerset multi-use trail. Click here for further details.

The North Dorset Trailway. If you're a fan of the old Somerset & Dorset Railway, you'll be delighted to hear that the local authorities in Dorset are making a concerted effort to establish a rail trail along its route south of Stalbridge on the Dorset/Somerset border. Click here for the full story.

More Grants from the Footpath Fund. Staying with the Somerset & Dorset Railway, in 2006, the club made a grant of £2,000 to Sustrans to open up a section of the line between Midford and Wellow in Somerset. Click here for further details. It has also given £500 to the Northern Viaducts Trust to help fund trackbed improvements between Smardale Gill and Podgill viaducts on the old Stainmore route across the Pennines. These grants follow on from our earlier award of £2,000 to the North Pennines Heritage Trust to help restore Alston Arches Viaduct on the scenic branch line from Haltwhistle to Alston – further details can be found by clicking here.

Links. After years of promises, the Webmaster has finally added a page of links to other sites with an interest in old railways, so that we can provide 'one-stop' access to a wide range of sites connected with the subject. Click here to try this out, or use the navigation bar above – a long way above if you've got this far! Further links will be added when time permits. It is no exaggeration to say that railway paths are being set up all over the world.

New Railway Paths. We remain delighted with the new rail trails in the west country, which prove that there are still plenty of old lines that can be found a new use in life, provided that local authorities have the imagination and the will. The 'Granite Way' in Devon (Okehampton-Lydford) is 10 miles long, or 20 miles if you continue via minor roads to Tavistock, where a further section of the line is now open to the public. Further west, the coast-to-coast 'Mineral Tramway' in Cornwall is about 25 miles long, and provides a link from Devoran, west of Truro, to Portreath. In Scotland, the Dava Trail linking Forres and Grantown-on-Spey is now open – that's a 20 mile route with, yet again, much old railway turned into 'trailway'.

Site Re-Design. It is now three years since our site was re-designed, and there has been some favourable feedback – from as far away as Australia. Thank you! Our objectives remain to make the site run quickly, for narrowband as well as broadband users, and to keep it simple to navigate. We hope also that visitors will find the contents interesting and easy reading. In late December 2007, the tally on our 'hit counter' exceeded 40,000, and current statistics show that we are now attracting over 1,000 visits per month.