Matt Ditch Photography Blog

  Tanfield Railway "North Pole Express" featuring Hawthorn Leslie "Keighley Corporation Gas Dept. No. 2", Robert Stephenson & Hawthorn "Sir Cecil A Cochrane" and Santa!

 Tanfield Railway "North Pole Express" 19/12/20 Keighley corporation gas dept. no. 2 & Santa!! at Causey No.2 & "Sir Cecil A Cochrane" taking the empty stock to East Tanfield at the start of the day. Please click here for the full gallery.

The Barber line - Harrogate Gasworks railway The Harrogate Gasworks railway was a narrow gauge railway that opened in 1908 to carry coal from Bilton Yard on the Leeds to Northallerton railway to New Park, the site of the Gasworks. Bitumen was then transported from New Park back to Bilton from transport to Middlesbrough. The railway ran for 1 mile and featured a very confined height 800 yard tunnel. Due to the size of the tunnel all the locomotives were built with a reduced height cab and fittings giving them a squat appearance. The lines first locomotive was "Barber" it was built in 1908 by Thomas Green & Sons of Leeds and spent its entire working life on the Harrogate Gas Works railway. It even used during the construction of the railway. "Barber" is based on a similar engine named "Masham" which worked on a nearby reservoir construction railway, both railways were built by Mr Edward Wilson Dixon M.Inst.C.E. "Barber" was named after Francis...

  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...