Liam

I thought I’d set up a guide to pubs and breweries within close proximity to railway stations across the network. This was an idea I had last week after a visit to Ludlow Brewery (fantastic) which is located in the former goods shed immediately to the north of the station, and all of one/two minutes’ walk away. I’ll categorise the stations and their nearby watering holes by geographical region, and within that alphabetical order. Please suggest away below and I’ll add them to the list in this post. East of England: Billericay - The Crown and The Railway Knebworth - The Station House Wivenhoe - The Station East Midlands: Beeston - The Victoria Dronfield - Dronfield Arms, with its own brewery Glossop - Star Inn Grantham - The Whistle Stop Hadfield - The Palatine Long Eaton - Sawley Junction Nottingham - Bearheadz; Vat & Fiddle (home of Castle Rock brewery) Oakham - The Grainstore Brewery Worksop - The Mallard London: Baker Street - The Metropolitan Denmark Hill - The Phoenix Kew Gardens - The Tap on the Line London Euston - The Doric; The Signal Box London Kings Cross - The Parcel Yard London Liverpool Street - Hamilton Hall Swiss Cottage - The Swiss Cottage (the station was named after the pub) North East: Durham - The Waiting Room Newcastle Upon Tyne - The Centurion Bar Wylam Next to the overhead signal box- Boathouse North West: Ashley (Cheshire) - The Greyhound Barrow In Furness - The Duke Of Edinburgh (at junction of station approach and main road) Bury Bolton Street (ELR) - Trackside Bar Irlam - The Station Carnforth - The Snug (a micropub) Frodsham - The Helter Skelter Greenfield - The Railway Inn Helsby - Beer Heros Liverpool Lime Street. Ma Edgerton's; The Crown Liverpool Moorfields - Golden Lion (opposite the old Exchange station entrance) Manchester Piccadilly - Piccadilly Tap Mobberley - The Railway Inn Morecambe - Station Promenade (a short walk from the current station) Mouldsworth - The Goshawk Oxenholme - The Station Inn Ravenglass - The Ratty Arms Rawtenstall (ELR) station building - Bufferstops Stalybridge - Stalybridge Buffet & bar Urmston - The Steamhouse Waterloo (Merseyside) - Stamps Too (across the road from the ticket office) Wigan North Western - Wigan Central Scotland: Aberdeen - Brewdog (on the upper level in the shopping centre); Aichies. Dingwall - The Mallard Edinburgh Waverley - Guildford Arms; Halfway House; The Booking Office (Wetherspoons) Inverness - Black Isle Brewery Bar Tain - Platform 1864 South East: Alton - The Railway Ashurst (New Forest) - The New Forest Inn Beaulieu Road - The Drift Brighton - The Evening Star Burgess Hill - The Railway Bursledon - The Jolly Sailor (the 'Howard's Way' pub) Chichester - The Fountain Dorking - Lincoln Arms East Croydon - Porter & Sorter Earlswood- Old Chestnut Eastleigh - Steam Town Brew Co. Eridge - The Huntsman Farnborough North - The Prince of Wales Faversham - The Limes; The Railway Hotel Hungerford - The Railway Tavern Lancing - The Railway Lewes - The Lansdown Arms London Road (Brighton) - The Signalman; The Open House Lymington - Bosuns Chair Maidstone West - Cellars Ale House Mottisfont & Dunbridge : The Mill Arms Newhaven - The Engineer North Camp - The Old Ford Penshurst - Little Brown Jug Portsmouth Harbour - The Ship Anson Reading - The Greyfriar; Three Guineas Seaford - Steamworks (in the station building) Shalford - Queen Victoria Shawford - The Bridge St Denys - The Junction Swanwick - The Talisman Uckfield - The Station Whyteleafe - The Radius Arms (micropub) Worthing - Grand Victorian Hotel And Pub Wye - The Tickled Trout South West: Bath Spa - Graze Exeter Central - Tabac Exeter St Davids - Exeter Brewery (only open certain days a week); The Imperial (up a steep hill). Lympstone Village - The Swan Inn Newton Abbot - Railway Brewhouse Newton St Cyres - The Beer Engine Penzance - Longboat Inn Portsmouth Arms - Portsmouth Arms Starcross - Atmospheric Railway Inn Yatton - The Railway Wales: Llandudno - Tapps Bar Porthmadog - Spooners Bar; The Australia; Purple Moose Brewery; The Station Inn. Prestatyn - The Cookhouse West Midlands: Alvechurch - The Weighbridge Inn Birmingham Moor Street - Kilder (craft beer, in the arches below the through platforms) Birmingham New Street - Post Office Vaults; The Railway Bournville - Attic Brew Co (limited opening hours) Bridgnorth (SVR) - The Railwayman's Arms Codsall - Codsall Station Pub Highley (SVR) - The Ship Inn Kidderminster - King & Castle (SVR); Weavers Real Ale House Ludlow - Ludlow Brewery Lye - Sadlers Brewhouse & Bar (the industrial estate on the Stourbridge bound platform); Beat Brewing (the industrial estate alongside the Birmingham bound platform) Stone - The Talbot Wolverhampton - The Great Western Yorkshire & Humber: Batley - The Cellar bar Dewsbury - West Riding refreshment rooms Doncaster - Draughtsman Harrogate - The Harrogate Tap Huddersfield station - Head of Steam, Kings Head (both once were accessible from the same platform but now normally from forecourt due to ticket barriers) Knaresborough - The Track and Sleeper; The Mitre Sheffield - Sheffield Tap Wakefield Kirkgate - Fernandez Brewery Wakefield Westgate - Henry Boons York - York Tap

We get this one at the Tesco in Barnstaple too, although my theory is that it’s stocked there as a result of a computer glitch - someone in the store could have done a search on their database for local breweries who are suppliers to Tesco, and the results have given the distance as the crow flies. Barnstaple to the Vale of Glamorgan isn’t a massive distance as the crow flies (about 30-40 miles), so that’s probably how it ends up in North Devon, even though in reality it’s over 130 miles by road...

I came across a video on YouTube the other day about Railnet, and how it seemed to be a waste of money. What caught my attention though is 6 minutes in, when mail workers are shown shifting parcels clearly showing the Amazon label. We won’t know if those particular parcels were put on a train during their shipment, and I now acknowledge that my book wasn’t, but it is still interesting and shows that Amazon parcels, if they’ve been sent by Royal Mail, are likely to go on mail trains.

Same issue with me Andy, and I’m on EE and currently using Virgin WiFi.

The M5 seems to have a high concentration of awful motorway services, although Sedgemoor and Michaelwood do the job. The only exception to that is Gloucester which is fitted out wonderfully but try eating there and you’re looking at a fiver for a small fancy sausage roll. Can’t comment on their pasty situation though @Captain Kernow.

You’d need a holiday after visiting Gordano services - once stopped there on my way back from Devon and found it awful!

Bless you!

Last week I picked up ‘The Flock’, the pack of six Black Sheep beers, from Morrisons for £9 and one of them was Holy Grail. I shall mention to my housemates that drinking it may cause one to say ‘Ni!’ randomly, or that there might be spontaneous requests to cut down a tree with a herring...

In July I did an All Line Rover too. It began on the day that face coverings became no longer mandatory in England, but I still kept a few with me and would go by the rule that I would wear one if I couldn’t stay socially distanced from other people. I started my rover ticket in Scotland, where face coverings were still mandatory, but once I crossed the border in England I went by the rule that I would wear a face mask if I couldn’t space out sufficiently from others. Despite this being mid July, a lot of the trains I travelled on weren’t terribly busy so in the course of the week I’d say that I wore my mask around 20% of the time.

Yes, have just had a closer look on my phone and the date listed underneath the washing out programme appears to be 24/4/1958. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating way to discover what motive power was around on the Brum-Stourbridge-Kidderminster-Worcs route among others, and also what workings Stourbridge provided traction for.

I too had a shed-related blast from the past yesterday Phil, as I visited the Engine House at Highley for the first time in two years. It’s looking a lot better now having changed some of the exhibits and in my opinion improved the presentation. Anyway they’ve now made a display of the running board from Stourbridge Junction shed, which includes a working to Norton Jn that if you put the layout back a few years you could try and replicate, but frustratingly it doesn’t reveal the allocated loco!

Wonderful photo Rob. Very atmospheric and for me it perfectly resembles the essence of Mountain Ash.

Visited the show yesterday with @Phil Bullock. It was an easy journey for me, 350 direct to MKC then hopped on the free shuttle bus to the Marshall Arena. I had pre-booked my ticket and sailed straight in having had my wristband given to me at the entrance door. The layouts on display were superb, and my favourites were Chilcompton Tunnel, Old Elm Park and Melton Mowbray North. Here are a few photos of them: Being a student, I knew that I shouldn’t be spending lots of money, but I did manage to come away with a Hattons mug (will come in handy!) and a Hornby 21T mineral wagon. Perhaps the most significant part of the exhibition was when I got to hold the EP of Accurascale’s GWR Manor. Looks a very worthy replacement of the old Bachmann ones.

I’ve just got in from GETS and personally I wasn’t very put off by the practices people chose to follow (or not follow). I’m 19 and double jabbed, I used hand sanitiser plenty of times and tried to ensure that with the exception of the people I was visiting the show with that I wasn’t rubbing shoulders with anyone else for more than a few moments, but with masks, if the people around you aren’t wearing one then you are no better off wearing one yourself. I’ve got some lateral flow tests with me and I’ll do a couple in the week to be certain that I haven’t picked the virus up at the show. As for the organisation of the show, the aisles seemed quite wide but inevitably there was the odd case of someone blocking them and causing congestion. At 15:00 the main hall began to empty out and you could certainly feel that it had become cooler and more spacious; not that I found the hall stuffy but one of the balconies definitely was at around 12:30/13:00.

My bad - not on tonight after all, instead there’s a programme about unearthing German submarines from the North Sea.

Which is back on tonight - by the looks of things there won’t be many RMwebbers watching!

Much as though I find canals interesting (we did a narrow boat holiday in Cheshire back in April this year), we have drifted quite a way from the original topic of Ian Hislop’s Trains That Changed the World.

In my OP I said how I liked the show but that was with my average TV viewer hat on, which we must remember is the hat which the majority of people watching it last night would have been wearing. As members of this forum we have pretty good railway knowledge, but the wider public are probably wouldn’t have such knowledge, and I guess that this was who Hislop aimed the programme towards. A previous episode covered the Flying Scotsman, and whether you’re a fan of the loco or not (personally I am) its history has been covered by other programmes hundreds of times before.

Been watching this for the past few weeks. I do like Ian Hislop, and on the whole this is a very good programme. He focuses on topics which would be of interest to the average viewer, such as how the railways brought fish to inland areas for the first time, along with enabling the introduction of a national football league. The one slight downside to the programme is that it is not exempt from those annoying Channel 5 competitions, and this one is ambiguously styled as ‘win £3,000 for a rail adventure’, with no further details on where you might go and what you might do.

Glad I found this thread. Back in March I ordered a copy of Steph Gillett’s ‘The Midland & South Western Junction Railway’ from Amazon, and it’s a very good read. The historical background is fascinating; it strikes me that the builders of the railway went for cheap above speed above quality, such was the urge to get a route into Southampton Docks as quickly as possible to allow the passage of goods from the Midlands via Southampton to Europe and beyond. I noticed there was discussion about when was the last time a train ran over what remains of the MSWJR to Ludgershall; this book mentions that in 2017 an army vehicle was taken from Ludgershall through the Channel Tunnel to mainland Europe.

Of course I do - but being Mayor of London a few years ago is very different to being Prime Minister during the Second World War, or alas a global pandemic. My previous post was rather tongue in cheek as I was trying to relate to the Tube scene from Darkest Hour.