Railways of Britain Magazine

31 March 2023

This is the tenth edition of Narrow Gauge Steam, meaning we have now reached 1,000 pages of material in the is series, including mostly previously unpublished images, colour and black & white. This time, historian Andrew Neale looks back at the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway from the end of the 1920s when stone was still carried along the line. We visit New Zealand to see what’s happening at the Plains Railway, we tell the story of the repatriation of three steam locomotives from Indianapolis, there are some great archive pictures from a long lost iron ore mine on Raasay in the Scottish Inner Hebrides and we look at items of narrow-gauge interest at a variety of National Trust sites, including Penrhyn Castle Museum and at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. Nick Brodrick looks at the late Adrian Shooter’s Beeches Light Railway - the only place outside of India where you can experience a Darjeeling Himalayan ‘B’ Class steam loco and we look at Saxon-Meyer locomotives preserved in Germany. There is British industrial narrow gauge at Kensal Green gasworks and at Eskrick Brickworks in Yorkshire. Finally, we go to Ireland with a mystery photographer who travelled to both the Republic and Northern Ireland to record the 3ft-gauge railway scene in 1953 - 70 years ago!