Ladies & Gentlemen,i give you the Bluebell Railway.

[GT49er]

Ladies & Gentlemen,i give you the Bluebell Railway.

Thank you very much. I've always wanted a PROPER train set!

 

[goldstone]

Sorry to disillusion you, but they will never get to Haywards Heath, sadly. There is no way that network rail - or anybody else - would give them running powers over the intensively used electrified couple of miles from Copyhold Junction into Haywards Heath.

The "siding" from Ardingly runs about a third of the way from Copyhold Junction to HH. Then it joins the additional southbound track for Platform 1 for a short distance. From that point there is a third southbound track used for the engine run-around for the Ardingly road-stone trains.

By siting the crossover point from the main southbound line to the "Platform 1" line a little closer to HH station there would be an exclusive track for the Bluebell trains all the way from Copyhold Junction to the east side of HH station where they can build their own platform as at East Grinstead. I believe the plans recently approved for the development of HH Station have reserved space for the Bluebell.

Doable in due course.

There are even plans as to how to get Bluebell tracks through Ardingly Station without disrupting the road-stone operation.

 

[Norman Potting]

Official video of the opening day here:-



WARNING contains small amount of Norman Baker!

 

[Barry Izbak]

Brilliant. Thanks for posting.
I would strongly recommend anyone to join the bluebell for £20 a year.
And as I found out the other day it gives you half price fare on the line.

 

[Wey-Arun Railway]

Can I just point out, the pic of (31)263 at EGR is actually the old High Level station on the cross-country line from Three Bridges to Eridge/Tunbridge Wells... west of EGR, the route is completely buggered, with major demolition to do in Crawley Down, while east you've got the A22 "Beeching Way"(!) on the trackbed for over a mile. Ironically, they had to widen that cutting to put the road in, and guess where they dumped the spoil? You've got it - Imberhorne! Now it's been used to extend the embankment at Horsted Keynes where the viaduct was (but was blown up after closure) - the remaining gap will be bridged with two spans laid end-to-end. All years off still as they've got to sort out the dire state of the track in HK station and their motive power fleet (they've got no working steam locos of any great size at the moment, they're reliant on hired stuff and even that keeps breaking down).