BRITAIN’S 20 BEST SEASIDE RAILWAYS
It has taken 40 years, but at last, regular passengers from the national network can complete their journeys to the coast over one of Europe’s top seaside heritage lines, namely the West Somerset Railway (WSR).
As highlighted in issue 254, main line operator Great Western Railway has agreed to run a trial series of DMU shuttles from Taunton to the southern terminus of heritage services, Bishops Lydeard, where passengers can change for a trip to Minehead, taking in the exhilarating views of the Bristol Channel coast as the line weaves it way past the Quantocks Hills and between Doniford Bay, Watchet, Blue Anchor and Dunster.
As reported in our News section, the first such shuttle ran on Saturday, July 27, and the experiment with five trains a day will continue until October 5.
Such a service could – and should – have been run after the WSR reached Bishops Lydeard in 1979, but the intransigence of local trade unionists who feared the loss of a handful of busmen’s jobs stonewalled it.
However, the trial has opened a new chapter in the proud history of Britain’s seaside railways.
Not only did Britain invent the steam railway locomotive, but its network of railways allowed resorts to spring up all around the coast in Victorian times, forming a plan of the nation’s tourist economy. Even though the motor coach and the car replaced the train as the preferred form of mass market travel to the coast in the Sixties, the country has been left with the legacy of what I believe to be, square mile by square mile, the finest set of seaside heritage railways anywhere in the world.
Variety
I began my love affair with seaside railways as an infant, when my family stayed at Goodrington next to, and travelled on,
