A little story that may interest some:
Around 1991/92 I was very involved with the Mid Hants, and one day whilst we shunted coaches around at Alresford with the 08 I had twenty minutes or so to spare waiting for the service train to turn up and decided to go and explore the far limits of the headshunt (Winchester) end of the line.
Thus I walked past the Carriage and Wagon departments coach and the Watercress Belle set on and on until the track became more and more grass covered and Ash trees started growing up between the sleepers.
Eventually I found myself in some kind of hidden world that couldn’t be seen a hundred yards up the line due to the foliage and quite clearly nothing or nobody had been this way for years.
In amongst this strange leafy world I found two things that completely blew my mind...
1) A load of open wagons all piled up in a heap that had obviously suffered some quite severe damage and been left there unrecoved.
I asked a friend at the time who’d been involved since the railway was first preserved in the Seventies about this and he said that they were the result of a runaway on the steeply graded line that had raced through the station at quite some speed and crashed into the bank at the end of the headshunt before being slightly hushed up and forgotten about.
I wonder if they’re still there?
That accident must’ve happened forty years ago now so it’s probably ok to relay the story.
And... 2)
S15 4-6-0 locomotive - 30499 in full “Don’t let me die” ex Barry condition tucked away out of sight in the trees with bushes growing through the frames and rust everywhere...
I knew that 30499 was on our stock list but I’d assumed that it had been stripped for spares to get our working S15 (30506) into service.
Pretty much all of our locos were around Ropley shed - even if they were stripped apart or tucked in a siding somewhere.
The last thing I expected when I took a stroll that day was to push aside some tree branches and find a complete ex Barry wreck hiding in a forgotten corner completely forgotten about...
Around 1991/92 I was very involved with the Mid Hants, and one day whilst we shunted coaches around at Alresford with the 08 I had twenty minutes or so to spare waiting for the service train to turn up and decided to go and explore the far limits of the headshunt (Winchester) end of the line.
Thus I walked past the Carriage and Wagon departments coach and the Watercress Belle set on and on until the track became more and more grass covered and Ash trees started growing up between the sleepers.
Eventually I found myself in some kind of hidden world that couldn’t be seen a hundred yards up the line due to the foliage and quite clearly nothing or nobody had been this way for years.
In amongst this strange leafy world I found two things that completely blew my mind...
1) A load of open wagons all piled up in a heap that had obviously suffered some quite severe damage and been left there unrecoved.
I asked a friend at the time who’d been involved since the railway was first preserved in the Seventies about this and he said that they were the result of a runaway on the steeply graded line that had raced through the station at quite some speed and crashed into the bank at the end of the headshunt before being slightly hushed up and forgotten about.
I wonder if they’re still there?
That accident must’ve happened forty years ago now so it’s probably ok to relay the story.
And... 2)
S15 4-6-0 locomotive - 30499 in full “Don’t let me die” ex Barry condition tucked away out of sight in the trees with bushes growing through the frames and rust everywhere...
I knew that 30499 was on our stock list but I’d assumed that it had been stripped for spares to get our working S15 (30506) into service.
Pretty much all of our locos were around Ropley shed - even if they were stripped apart or tucked in a siding somewhere.
The last thing I expected when I took a stroll that day was to push aside some tree branches and find a complete ex Barry wreck hiding in a forgotten corner completely forgotten about...
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