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MEMBERSHIP DETAILS

Benefits of Membership

  • A quarterly magazine, Railway Ramblings, which contains walk reports, news and articles.
  • Local walks and social events in many parts of the country where you can meet like-minded walkers and enthusiasts.
  • Regional newsletters in areas where branches have been established.
  • Access to the 'Gazetteer' section of this website, which lists official railway paths throughout the British Isles.
  • An opportunity to support our Footpath Fund, which has been used to finance the purchase of lines such as Whitehaven to Rowrah (Cumbria), Thame to Princes Risborough (Oxon/Bucks), and a link in Somerset which connects the Cheddar Valley Railway Path with the station at Yatton. (For further details, see our History page.)
  • An opportunity to demonstrate to local authorities and the government that there is a real demand for making the most of old railways and creating leisure facilities away from roads.

At the moment, the club cannot handle the enrolment of new members on-line, but click here for a printable form which includes our current membership rates. If you want to view an electronic copy of our gatefold brochure, click here, but remember that you will need Adobe Reader to open this; a free download is available here. If you want to print the brochure, then – if you can – set the page scaling to 'None' and the print layout to 'Borderless', otherwise Adobe Reader will add its own borders. This is not a major problem, but has the effect of making the printed area slightly smaller than it should be. If you then went to the trouble of folding the brochure at 99mm and 198mm, you would find that the content of each page was not centred. For most visitors, this 'problem' will be insignificant, but it caused no end of head-scratching when we were getting the brochure ready for our printer!
 
Above: Members at Alexandra Palace in north London after a walk from Finsbury Park. Even in London, parts of old railways have been reclaimed for public use. The old station at 'Ally Pally' has now been restored for the local community. Barely a mile away at Cranley Gardens is a railway viaduct that is now open to walkers and cyclists – probably the only one in the capital that no longer carries trains. 8 April 2000. (Geoff Sargeant)
 

An Author's View

'Old railways provide uniquely fascinating routes through both town and country, but they remain man-made, artificial routes. Almost inevitably, one finds questions coming to mind - why does the line go this way rather than that? who travelled this route and why? and what sort of machines were in use? The more you think you know, the more the questions multiply and the more fascinating the whole exercise becomes - and I use the word "exercise" deliberately for, if railway walking does nothing else, it does get us out of the dusty archives and into the open air.' (Anthony Burton, Walking the Line, Blandford Press, 1985)