The day before I attended this year’s ZEDEX, the annual convention for Z and N scale narrow gauge modellers, I travelled down from the Lake district to Oxfordshire. I took advantage of a fairly leisurely day to potter about the Cotswolds taking in some of the railway attractions. First up was the Gloucester Warwickshire Railway at Toddington. This is a 12 mile section of the former Great Western Railway’s ‘Honeybourne Line’ and currently stretches from Cheltenham Racecourse to Laverton with sights set on reaching the site of the former Broadway station by 2017. Toddington has the classic look of a GWR country station with all of the characteristic GWR details The attraction of the weekend was the accompanying North Gloucestershire Narrow Gauge Railway which is an independent organisation from the standard gauge operation but shares the Toddington site They were having their Narrow Gauge festival with three locos in steam Kerr Stuart 0-4-2ST Stanhope built 1917 More in a mo' Kev
Jung 0-4-0WT Justine built by Jung in 1906 was running a demonstration train in the yard at California Crossing with some small tipper wagons Henshel Brigaderlok 0-8-0T no 15 built 1917 which worked on a Mozambique sugar estate this was working Top and tailed with the Kerr Stuart on the passenger train. In the yard was a Hunslet diesel that also regularly works passenger trains Note its smaller garden railway brother in the foreground! back with some standard gauge stuff, and main line steam shortly Kev
On the standard gauge first generation class 117 DMU was working turnabout with LMS 8F 2-8-0 48274 which has the distinction of having been exported to Turkey during 1941 where it became TCCD 45160 working until the 1980s before repatriation and return to steam in 2010 Seen in the yard was Churchward 28xx 2-8-0 2874 awaiting restoration GWR 2-8-0T built in 1919 and withdrawn in 1962 the loco returned to steam in 2014 This loco spent its working life on coal trains in the Welsh valleys kev
On the diesel side Peak class 45 149 has been restored to Rail blue and was stood in the yard with Class 26 D5343 also in Rail blue. Class 04 0-6-0DM 11230 in classic early BR Black at Toddington Class 03 0-6-0DM D2182 shunts the yard at Winchcombe
Seen at Toddington Signal box the signaller hands the train crew the single line token Winchcombe also has a classic GWR signalbox Looking at the time I realised I had time to get to Moreton in the Marsh station to catch GWR Castle Class 4-6-0 5043 'Earl of Mount Edgecombe' on the 'Cotswold Explorer' railtour. This blasted through the station. Moreton also retains its classic signalbox for now
Next a call to a country pub for a couple of pints of real ale (Adnams Ghost ship) and then checking in to the hotel at Didcot meant there was enough light left to spend a bit of time at Didcot railway station on the Great Western main line. Visible in the rays of the setting sun in the yard at Didcot railway Museum was the restored GWR Steam railmotor which has been allowed out onto the rail network running specials. Nobody ever expected that to happen! Video of a very pleasant day out can be found at [video=youtube_share;Tsvry-AhOTs]http://youtu.be/Tsvry-AhOTs?list=UUI6p-eLL5zX3K226z27Josg[/video] Cheers KEV
In your first couple of photos, what is that elevated structure seen in background? Water? Some sort of fuel bunker? Sand perhaps? Also, what is the gauge of that little steam operation? Perhaps in the area of (non-metric) 20 inches? In the video, that DMU sounds a lot like city buses I recall from about fifty years ago.
