Michael Crofts

Brilliant! thanks. It all adds colour to the story of how the Tramway was worked. And you've set us a puzzle which is to identify which is the 1969 and which the 1947 edition of the WTT. We know that BR were referring to the Tramway as Messrs. Prentice's siding when the 1960s signalling diagram was drawn, so perhaps the WTT with the same name is the one from 1969. But if so it's odd, because the name of Prentice disappeared and Fisons was the relevant name from, probably, 1929.

Lindsay - as you thought, it doesn't work with a free account and I'm not likely to add geocaching to my budget right now so if the owner of the picture is willing to share that would be great. I've sent you a PM.

Thanks for the photos. Have you got a link to the 2020 photo? I've a feeling I ought not to delay getting there, to measure the loco shed.

Tom - I'm very glad you did take (and publish) that photo - it's a great rarity. Yes, there were coprolite deposits in the area and I think (not sure yet) that's why the original Manure Works, later fertiliser and chemical factory was established and eventually taken over by Fisons who I believe still ran it at the time you took your photo. I reckon you caught the very end of the tramway's existence, with all BR rolling stock removed. Thanks Richard, that diagram is very much appreciated because I had noticed the reference to 'Prentice's Siding' on a comment on Tom's photo on Flickr, and wondered if that name was correct. Now I know it is I will try and find out who Messrs Prentice were, the name hasn't cropped up anywhere else yet. Perhaps the answer will be in the Middleton book I've ordered. Anyway, the diagram definitely confirms what I thought which is that so far as BR were concerned the Burwell Tramway's status was a mere private siding, not a light railway, very much like Richard Garrett's Leiston Works Railway. One of the unpublished photos I have been shown gives detail of the connection to BR beyond what is shown in Blandford1969's photo above - I don't yet have permission to publish the "new" photo.

Thanks, I'll follow that up. Thanks for the map, which I hadn't seen - probably that's the one which led to the Wikipedia and RailMapOnline references. It runs to the Cold Store where there was a passing loop. Those two photos seem to be the only ones online. If you go back please let us know what you find. I think there might be some bridge abutments. The tracks crossing Little Fen Drove have gone - I'm wondering whether there might be some buried in concrete where the brickworks was or where it crossed the by-road beside the Cold Store. I hope to go myself some time this year but I live in Gloucestershire and my regular journeys are to Plymouth and Durham - east Anglia always has to be a special journey and too far for a day trip.

I discovered the Burwell Tramway in 1969 when I was working as a guard for British Rail at Cambridge. It ran for about 2 ½ miles from a siding off the Fordham-Soham GER line to a brickworks and what was then the Fisons fertiliser factory between the Burwell Lode and Little Fen Drove. I walked quite a bit of the track but I never saw a train and I can't find my photos. I would like to know more about it and have ordered "Lines Around Newmarket" which apparently has a section describing it - but I believe it also appeared in the Railway Magazine because there is a reference in the "Railway Museum" citation index, which says: Main subject - Burwell Tramway Title of publication - Railway magazine Reference -1263/98 Date (if given) - [no text] Can anyone tell me if that citation refers to a 1998 edition of the Railway Mag (and even better, which issue) so I can track it down? Also, Wickipedia and Railmaponline refer to a narrow gauge line which connected to the Burwell Tramway near the Cold Store on First Drove but I haven't yet found it on the NLS maps - I'm wondering if it appeared on an edition which they don't have. Has anyone got a map which shows it? This is my cobbled-together map of the railway: https://perrygrovefarm.co.uk/Burwell_Tramway_Map_Mosaic.pdf

Still there?

Deepdale Mill Street, Preston (with acknowledgements to Steven B on the thread 'When the real thing looks like a model'). One of Martin Hilbert's marvellous photos of this location in times past:

Thanks so much for this - I was worried I might have started a wild goose chase! What a lovely find.

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=15.8&lat=54.64842&lon=-3.56951&layers=170&right=ESRIWorld

Here?

Another generous offer to share photos - this time from Mark A. Cleave who visited the remains of the Lever Brothers railway system serving Port Sunlight & Bromborough Port on the Mersey in 2021. I have selected those photos which show relics of the permanent way and put them in a Flickr album. I've asked Mark to look at the captions and perhaps help amplify them. There was quite a lot to see in 2021 - how much is still there? https://www.flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/albums/72177720304949434

Yes, the first set of points and the siding to the left. I'm trying to place this on an NLS side-by-side map but the only one I can find is from the 6" series and isn't sufficiently detailed to be sure.

Geof Pinfold has generously allowed me to share his photos of Snowdown Colliery in Kent. The recent photos are dated 26th December 2022 and show the remaining siding disused since 1989. Approx 300m still in place. His photo from 1982 helps understand the location - The first set of points and the siding to the left, are still in place. Please respect Geof's copyright of these images. To avoid consuming RMweb's storage too much (and to avoid loss of the images if there's another disaster with the rmweb server) I've put them here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/albums/72177720304915447

I'm copying this from another forum because it's relevant to the issue of civil works cost inflation caused not by technical or constructional difficulties but the involvement of layer after layer of bureaucracy. In 1993 my wife and I bought a dilapidated 22 acre smallholding in the Forest of Dean after consulting the local Planning Officer who said he would support our idea of a 15 inch gauge railway because the local plan explicitly promoted tourism. He actually came out to the site before we exchanged contracts and spent a couple of hours looking at it and going through the folders describing previous (mostly failed) planning applications for the site. Encouraged by that we bought the place and spent a couple of hundred pounds on some scrappy drawings by a part-time draftsman which showed a somewhat different scheme to the one we actually built and sent in the planning application form TP1 (I think it was about 5 pages of simple questions and answers) accompanied by some photos of our first locomotive posed at Irton Road on the Ravenglass & Eskdale with a very tall man standing on the platform to make the engine look smaller. The planning application went reasonably smoothly until they asked for a Traffic Survey. I got a quote for that which was £9,000 so I managed to get hold of a copy of one which had been done for another site, changed the relevant details, made my own estimates and calculations, and sent it in. We got permission and I then spent a few months changing the design to something that might actually work, doing my own survey with a Dumpy level (I didn't even own a theodolite - too expensive). I was quite pleased with the result - there was only one cock-up. We started digging at Easter 1995. Her Majesty's Railway Inspector didn't want paperwork or drawings. I think we had 2 exchanges of correspondence and I visited the local Inspector in Bristol for a friendly chat. When we had completed the running line he came out for a train ride bringing his secretary with him so she could see what a site visit was like, and asked me a lot of questions to see if I was likely to be able to run the railway without killing anyone. I must have convinced him because we got a copy of a very complimentary letter written by him to HQ at Rose Court and they sent us a letter saying we could open to the public. We opened for business in August 1996 and the first ticket was issued to the Planning Officer who came to have a look at what we'd done. He didn't say anything about the bits that had changed from the original plan. We didn't employ a single consultant or outside adviser, we made a lot of it up as we went along, and we very nearly completed it within budget, the budget being set by the amount of money we had including a second mortgage. None of that could happen today. Pre-application planning advice has to be paid for and rarely extends to overt support of a proposal. The cost of feasibility studies, design works, environmental surveys, prelims including site access and welfare works, and all the various applications for approvals, etc., etc., etc. would be more than the total cost of building the complete railway 26 years ago even after adjusting for inflation. I gave a talk to a railway preservation society in 2016 in which I listed 38 pieces of new and amended primary and secondary legislation which came in after we built our railway, on top of the Health and Safety laws which already existed in 1995. There isn't a nice friendly HMRI any more, and every time you encounter a public body they demand a fee. The Bala Lake Railway extension web page has an interesting paragraph at the moment: 'We have acquired much of the land for the route and worked with local consultants to prepare and submit a planning application. This has been very challenging, demanding, time consuming and much more costly than originally anticipated'. I read a heart-rending memorandum by a Network Rail engineer a while back in which he described the difference between renewing an inter-station crossover in BR days and what it is like now. A job that would have taken 24 hours or less on site in the past and been done entirely by railway staff and equipment within the railway boundary now requires multiple contracts with third parties, several weeks for a temporary road access to be constructed, a small village of portacabins and welfare facilities, and restoration works after the job has been done - plus a vast amount of designs and documentation. One final example of civils cost inflation. Our local council wants to install a new footpath/cycleway, about a mile long, giving access to us and 2 other attractions. They thought it might cost £750,000. I reckoned I could do it for half that. They put the design out to consultants who have done a feasibility study and estimated the cost at £3 million. It's not happening (but the consultants got their fee).

The London tram system, Kingsway Subway. Then: https://dewi.ca/trains/conduit/subway.html Now: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5189685,-0.1210251,3a,75y,164.29h,74.14t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shUPr1-a1J_3hHQbge6gPjw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

A modern Season's Greetings to all, from the Forest of Dean where this year the snow came too early for a white Christmas, and got a bit trampled before we could get the photos. Photo: David & Kat Nelson-Brown, Perrygrove Railway

OK, so this topic seems to be of interest 👍 Tunnels are the ideal scenic break and bridges are almost as good, buses or no buses. How about a different approach, by adjusting the point of view? Bodmin & Wenford branch - track curving out of sight behind trees. Photo by Sid Sponheimer Probably wouldn't work looking straight down from above. And it certainly wouldn't look right with a Pacific and 13 on.

It might be cheating to propose locations where there was an excellent scenic break at one end but one would need to invent something for the other end, like Lasswade for example: http://disused-stations.org.uk/l/lasswade/lasswade(harden_c1930s)old3.jpg http://disused-stations.org.uk/l/lasswade/index.shtml

Cinderford, Forest of Dean. Most photos show the scene from the road which went over the railway, but this rather poor one shows the convenient curve and scenic break. There are good photos in the books.

I've remembered a thread on this forum about the ex military depot at Weedon Bec. Three years ago there were rails in he concrete - they might still be there. Sadly the best of the photos in the thread were lost in the disaster. I purloined this picture of the weighbridge with rails and I think that might still be there. Here's the original thread:

I've just seen a Facebook post about the railways around Burneside Station on the Windermere branch including the tramway which served the James Cropper paper mill. It suggests there may still be some rails around the site of the old station. Here's a screenshot of the post: And here's a NLS side-by-side screenshot I'm sceptical about this but maybe someone will pass by and take a look one day.

I have a couple of suggestions, just to see if this topic interests anyone. Lavenham, Suffolk Scotland Street, Edinburgh 1853 map: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_edin_t/0_edinburgh_transport_railways_scotland_street_station.htm#1853_map 1914 Map View North View South http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_edin_t/0_edinburgh_transport_railways_scotland_street_station_1024.jpg

For my last contribution I have nothing to offer except a suggestion. I think there might be something in the Port of Par which counts as abandoned rails in the road. But I've posted enough from Google and perhaps someone with local knowledge could contribute a picture. By the way, looking back through the thread, if this sort of thing does appeal then my advice is to go to Sheerness docks ASAP. It's the only place I know which has more-or-less a complete layout of tracks, nearly all joined up. If you want to see what things used to be like, that's the place to go.

Another foreign one. Ireland. Guinness Brewery Railway in Dublin. Lots of images on Google, mostly of track in the visitor centre. But here's a screenshot I snaffled a while back showing the area round where the engine shed and turntable were (I've indicated the position of the turntable), together with a public domain photo of the area and a link to a Peter Brabham Flickr post of a John Wiltshire photo. I believe these tracks are still there, it would be nice to know for certain.