papagolfjuliet

Newtondale Box was demolished, or rather dismantled as I think I'm right in saying that the bricks etc were saved and the base was stabilised (it's still there), in the late 90s when Roger Heath was Chairman.

Not really, or nothing that a passing loop wouldn't cure. The big capacity problem is on the Levisham - Pickering stretch (singled during WW1) which could theoretically be ameliorated by having one train leave Pickering just after another arrives, but that in turn would necessitate an extra carriage set and also create the problem of people turning straight round without any secondary spend on the station or in the town. Doubling the whole lot between Goathland and Levisham would entail moving Newtondale Halt, redoubling a lot of bridges which have been singled since preservation, realigning the track in places where curves have been eased meaning that you'd be back to a curvature so tight in that during BR days the stretch was subject to a 35mph speed restriction and which would not be kind to LNER pacifics or 9Fs, losing the up loop at Goathland, and losing the sections of trackbed currently used by firefighting vehicles. And apparently it to took quite a lot of money for Mr Scott et al to find that out for themselves.

Incidentally I know about the Rochester Avenue one because I nearly fell into it when replacing some decking! It is barely a foot below the surface right behind the back doors of the houses.

One runs parallel to Rochester Avenue just below the surface linking an underground barracks on Delce Road (now a garage) and Fort Clarence, and another links the garage to Fort Pitt. There are tunnel entrances behind the billboards at the bottom of Chatham Hill leading goodness knows where. A large area of the cliff on the Rochester bank of the Medway inland of the bridges was hollowed out during WW2 to create an underground Short Sunderland factory - basically everything under St. Margaret's Street. And so on.

That 'adit' you can see in the bank of the Murk Esk under the old school isn't an adit. It's one end of a horizontal drift.

One of my favourite things to do if I had a couple of hours to kill used to be to buy a Grosmont-Goathland single and then walk back along the 1836 route with a pint at the Birch Hall midway. Can't do that now. Nobody can. Not that I would give the NYMR a penny piece now anyway.

All of Grosmont village is seriously undermined. Estate agents tend not to mention that fact (just as they don't mention the network of Napoleonic and WW2 tunnels which undermine most of the Medway Towns, or the fact that the the pretty bit of Robin Hood's Bay is built on top of boulder clay which could go walkies any second.)

Before binning the new sales prospectus - sorry, Moors Line - I glanced at the Price interview and noted the bit where he said "We are the envy of every other heritage railway" and, er, no. The envy of the Teifi Valley and the West Somerset, maybe.

Yes. As to the rebranding, I am referring to the new look Moors Line which in addition to the cost of rebranding costs more to produce and distribute, and is effectively nothing more than a series of articles on how brilliant the management team are with the boring stuff about trains relegated to a few paragraphs at the back.

From the YP article: "It was stated by the accountants that trustee and finance director Garry Mumford’s consultancy firm, Insight Associates Ltd, has received over £6,600 in fees from the railway, and almost £93,000 the previous year." Righto.

It's ridiculous in another way too: that's £45 for an entire year, which means seats on trains are pretty well being given away to anybody who can afford regular repeat visits while casual walk up visitors are being priced out. So the seats which are filled aren't being paid for. You'd think they were actively trying to shut the place down.

And now they're handing round the begging bowl again because they've spent so much money on themselves and on their pointless and offensive rebranding exercise that they can't even afford to cover what should be core competencies such as keeping the access to their most popular station open. https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/24183959.bid-save-harry-potter-bridge-goathland-station/

Unless the entire senior management team is removed and soon - which has happened before when another group of Big I Ams ran the railway into the ground in the 90s - I doubt whether the NYMR will last much longer. I honestly think it's too late this time. I have loved that line since I was a toddler and I will never, ever forgive Price and Bailey and Strangeways et al for what they have done to it. The sight of John Bailey lecturing L&B members on good governance over on Nat Pres when his crackbrained management philosophy has destroyed the line for which he is responsible makes me sick into my own scorn. Sixty years of work by thousands of people, all to create a cyclepath.

Evidently some sort of gauging or bridge maintenance train judging by the rigs on the two open wagons. North British BG next to the brake van. I don't recognise the saloon; I assume it did not survive?

More on the Mexican sets: if you want a graphic demonstration of the gulf (no pun intended) between the British and North American loading gauges, scroll towards just before the seven minute point here for an EMD SD70 coupling up to an HST.

The bit of the Gartell Light Railway which uses the old S&D trackbed isn't especially old. Late 90s, I think.

Every time I drive from Peebles towards the Drumelzier/Dawyck area I look down at that line and especially the stunning setting of the viaduct over the Tweed by Neidpath Castle and think how wonderful it would be to reopen it, so I can't think of a project I'd rather support than this. Super stuff.

EVERY time the big I Ams take over, this is what happens. West Somerset, Teifi Valley, Llangollen, GCR... the list goes on. It already happened once on the NYMR, in the wretched days of Horner and Pearce. And nobody ever seems to learn from other lines' mistakes. This trend will not stop until a major preserved line gets turned into a cycle path, of that I am sure.

And despite being skint they're still advertising something like a dozen paid jobs including one for a 'Marketing Campaigns Manager' paying up to £35k. Sod 'em.

To say nothing of the new Moors Line, which is basically a puff piece for the senior management team with next to no mention of anything but how brilliant they all are. Feels more like a sales brochure than the house journal of a heritage railway. First time ever in forty-five years that instead of adding a new Moors Line to my library I chucked it straight in the bin. I am giving very serious thought to telling them to shove my life membership where the sun don't shine.

Much footage of Newcastle Central in 1976 in Barlow & Watt true crime series 'Second Verdict.' Plus Barlow somehow manages to refer to a works diagram of the exact coach in which the murder took place. Clever chap.

And then of course there's Target, featuring men in double-breasted Italian suits kicking men in grey slacks in the crotch.

Interesting how you can divide 70s British crime/espionage series into two categories. On the one hand there's stuff like The Sweeney and Callan: tin ashtrays, Watney's Red Barrel, men in grey slacks kicking one another in the crotch. On the other there's stuff like The Professionals and Return of the Saint: onyx ashtrays, Babycham, men in double breasted Italian suits kicking one another in the crotch.

Brian Clemens was used to rapid turnarounds. He'd cut his teeth working for the Danziger Brothers, who would hire the sets of recenly completed films for a week and give their writers two days in which to come up with a script to match whatever they'd rented. Clemens: "They'd come to me and say 'Look, we've got two weeks to shoot, so we want you to write something for these sets, and it must have the Old Bailey, a submarine and a mummy's tomb in it.' So I'd write it to order. And nobody believes that they made movies like this once, but it's absolutely true""

Can anybody identify the closed station at the start of this episode of 'Hunter's Walk'?