Matt Ditch Photography Blog

  The Owd Ratty: Gill Force Tramway The present day terminus for the railway is built on the formation of the Gill Force Tramway. This 1951 shot shows "The Pretender" waiting to take a train back down the valley to Ravenglass. Ben Brooksbank Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0 In the previous post (link here) I covered the history of the Owd Ratty and the line up to Boot in Eskdale. I mentioned that at Gill Force junction the line split and a tramway ran to the mines at Gill Force. The history of this part of the Owd Ratty is not as well documented as the Boot branch and to date there are no known images of the line. What is known is that the line was built in 1880 for the “South Cumberland Iron Company” they were looking for Iron ore on the opposite side of the valley to the mines at Nab Gill. The mines weren’t very successful and only lasted a few years closing completely in 1884. The site of Gill Force junction today. As I stated in the last post, th...

For this weeks "Throwback Thursday" I thought we'd take a look back to the Bowes Railway in 2017. The 2nd of April marked the last operating day for orignal Bowes locomotive, Andrew Barclay 0-4-ST No.22. Along with W.S.T both engines need overhauls before they can run again. The event also marked the first public display of Ruston 165s “Pink” & “Perky” from the Port Of Sunderland.  Link to full gallery

 

 The Green Dragon Railway Fowler Saccharine being pulled up the incline by Fiji at the Statfold Barn Railway in March 2017.THTRail2013. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Several years ago there were plans to build a narrow gauge railway near Kielder Reservoir in Northumberland. The project was to be named "The Green Dragon" and would have been built on part of the trackbed of the Border Counties railway. A new terminus was planned near to Kielder castle (pictured below) with the railway rejoining the former Border Counties trackbed a short distance from there. Unfortunately the project never came to fruition. But, it is possible to walk the majority of the planned route. A grainy map of the proposed route does exist but it is difficult to make out some of the details of the route. The line would have ran for just under 2 miles to a terminus at Gowanburn, near the site of Lewiefield Halt on the edge of Kiel...

  Tanfields Railways 2017 "Legends of Industry" gala. featuring visiting locomotives, Hawthorn Leslie 3931/1938 ‘Linda’ and Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns 7673/1950 “Ugly” "Linda" and a mixed train leave Marley Hill yard. "Ugly" at Bowes Bridge with a demonstration coal train The full gallery can be found here Please consider supporting this website on Patreon. Their are exclusive perks for those who do. Or alternatively visit my Ko-Fi page by clicking here.

South Tynedale Railway - Narrow gauge in the Pennines Hunslet 0-4-2 "Green Dragon" at Alston The South Tynedale railway is built on the trackbed of the standard gauge "Alston branch", which opened in sections between 1851-1852. The Alston branch ran from Haltwhistle on the Newcastle-Carlisle line and was closed in 1976. Although a preservation society was set up to preserve the branch and run it in its original standard gauge state, they were sadly unsuccessful in this and the line was taken up. In 1977 they turned their attention to reopening as a narrow gauge railway. By 1983 the South Tynedale railway officially opened to the public and by 1986 they had reached Gilderdale halt, which lies on the boundary between Cumbria and Northumbria. Since then the railway has opened extensions to Kirkhaugh (1999), Lintley Halt (2012) and to Slaggyford station (2018). This gives the railway a total distance of around 5 miles. The extension to Slaggyford comes on the back of ...