Murican

Yeah, this was what I had in mind when writing up the idea for the Standard 8 2-6-0.

Probably right. My bad.

Never mind I just realized that if my idea for a Standard 2-10-2 were to come about, the easier solution would be to just relocate 8Fs to the Western Region. Or even without said imaginary locomotives do that. To say nothing of the possibility of having a few USATC S160s stay in the UK.

Going back to the subject of Imaginary Locomotives, how well would have a Standard 8 fleet of 2-8-0s worked on the Southern Region? My idea behind them was to rememdy complaints about the 9F on the Western Region, but I figured such a locomotive would also work for the Southern Region.

UPDATE: Apparently, Devvy had written up his idea that the Severn Valley Railway is longer than in real life. The post explaining this says that since in his alternate timeline more BR lines remain open, the heritage railways that do exist are much longer. To that end, I could see the equipment of the West Somerset Railway being used on the SVR since both are Great Western lines.

An alternative scenario: would the Devon and Somerset from Dulverton to Barnstaple be viable as a tourist line as well?

For the record, this is the map that was created by Devvy, the create of the alternatehistory.com TL which I've been using as one of my main sources of inspiration (it's called 12:08 - Redux for those interested). The user basically took this map of the proposed cuts under Dr. Beeching and played around with it. The lines colored in black are the routes that Dr. Beeching tried to close, only for the lines to remain anyway. Right off the bat, I noticed that the NYMR as it exists in reality would be butterflied. However, I could see an LNER heritage group still run a few locomotives over that line. Plus, other lines are closed and taken over by heritage groups as the alternate TL goes on.

UPDATE: Apparently, the alternatehistory.com story that inspired many of my ideas here has the Taunton to Morehead line remain a part of BR. So in such an alternate time some if not most of the WSR stuff could end up at this hypothetical S&DHR. In such a scenario, I could easily see the two class 33 diesels end up on it. They do have Southern heritage after all.

I suppose in the case of the West Somerset, it does raise the question of if it could have remained a viable line under BR had someone more competent than Beeching been put in charge. I know someone on alternatehistory.com who could have an answer.

Fair enough if it pertains to real-life. But I have wondered what a S&D heritage line could be like if it were an analogue of sorts to the Great Central heritage railways in a reality where the GCR is still active as a mainline mostly for fast freight and occasional passenger trains.

Settle & Carlisle, right? If not the S&D, what other pull-up lines could be good tourist railways?

Loosely related to some of my locomotive ideas: what parts of the S&DJR would have been best as tourist lines? If I wasn't concerned abour plausibility, I'd want to go for preserving the Bath to Bournemouth line as a whole, but I want to try and maintain some degree of realism, which is also why most of my pre-nationalization ideas were based on locomotives that were actually proposed.

That's another reason I thought of my ideas for what proposed locomotives I would have bought into reality. The idea of several stronger engines doing the work of more smaller engines.

OR rather, I underestimated just how much of UK rail history would be rewritten. I mean, I already knew that UK loading gauge can be pretty unforgivingly small, but I originally thought it was fairly exaggerated to some degree.

For example, one idea I had in mind when creating the Standard 9 Mountain, beyond Gresley and Bulleid getting their chance, was for if the LMS then BR really went full-throttle with intermodal-esque concepts for their non-mineral goods traffic. Meaning trains that go far longer distances with much fewer stops.