Backtrack

This is the story of two towns and the ‘Gingerbread Line’ connecting them. The sobriquet ‘Gingerbread’ alludes to the putative making of gingerbread in the Shropshire town of Market Drayton, an industry dating back to the eighteenth century. During t

The small town of Shirebrook is situated in the farthest north east corner of Derbyshire. Its narrow terraced streets lie in the postindustrial shadow of spoil heaps now being reclaimed by nature. It presents a somewhat bleak prospect today dominated

Whilst collecting stock for the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway stand at the 2021 Leiston Works Railway model railway exhibition, I stumbled across a 1952 edition of Trains Illustrated. This included a short article on the then recent closure of the Mid-Su

When one wanders around a Model Railway Exhibition and sees prominently displayed on the shelf of a second-hand bookstall a copy of the 1985 reprint edition of the July 1922 Bradshaw, just begging to be purchased, what does one do? Well, one makes an

Much of East Anglia east of Cambridge and Peterborough was monopolised by the Great Eastern Railway. However, in the south the GE faced competition from the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway and in the north from the Midland & Great Northern Joint R

It was whilst reading through some of the notes I had inherited from the late Geoffrey Webb that I came across this small entry which he had copied from a Railway Gazette (RG). I wondered if he had condensed it, since he wrote everything down in long

The long summer holiday from school, devoid of any looming worries about having to earn a living, was something to be treasured more than we realised at the time, I suspect. School itself didn't worry me, despite certain aspects that I had an unreaso

Many large cities have suburban rail services, indeed many could not function satisfactorily without them as can be seen when industrial action closes them down temporarily. Some used to have such services but now no longer have them as a result of b