Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway General Discussion

Kebabs should be ok.

 

Too fatty, and lamb fats the worst - youll have flames right through the tubes !

 

News that Ratty has been blocked by a landslide. Their website has the following
"Due to a landslip caused by extreme weather conditions over the weekend, we have had to suspend train services until Saturday 9th October. Our cafés at Ravenglass & Dalegarth remain open for business.

Our track gang are on site assessing the damage which has displaced approx. 160 yards of track. The teams will be working hard to clear the line and repair the track. We will keep the public updated on our Facebook page.

Customers that have pre-booked tickets will be contacted by our office staff directly. Please do not call us as our phone lines are extremely busy.

We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding and patience."

Pictures show track buried and displaced, but the trackbed doesn't seem to be too bad. Hopefully they can repair quickly and resume running. Obviously they will also have to survey the area above the line to check stability.

 

I hope they don't suffer even more, the weather is absolutely abysmal in Cumbria today and forecast to be even wetter tomorrow!

 

Some pics on this local media website, if you wish to avoid Facebook:-

https://cumbriacrack.com/2021/10/03...QoBN2Arrmxc5m4Qmm9H5cTwoUAChfkTyUnq2_YDONScF4

 

Found old pics of Irron Road, the station was previously with another window and door by 1900. Question is it looks like a pair of semis ,the left side is currently an open waiting room. so was it originally built at half the size?
Edit going for the euro millions today if win will try and duel gauge it with 3foot 3rd rail!!!
Do any drawings of Devon and Nab Gill still exist? A new built would be lovely but nowhere much to run it? Isle of Man or maybe Southwold one day?

 

Try reaching out to the Ravenglass Railway Museum as they might possibly have a set of drawings in the archive, I can ask tomorrow if you would like when I am down that way?

 

That would be fabulous.. Might pop by this weekend if you turn up anything. Its for a garden rail project really, but there is a similar loco burnishing in a desert...

 

R&ER is holding a mini=Gala on 5-6 November with two visiting locos from Kirklees Light Railway La’al Locomotives at La’al Ratty | Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway (ravenglass-railway.co.uk)

 

Timetable and loco roster now up on website:

https://ravenglass-railway.co.uk/events/la-al-locomotives-at-la-al-ratty

 

Can't see details of the visitors, but clocked that the Santa Express has sold out! That's excellent news and my congratulations to all involved in organising and promoting the event so successfully.

 

Hopefully this helps

 

Cheers @Steamie Boxes. Great lineup. I note the visitors scheduled to operate double headed with a home loco, whilst Katie gets solo runs. I'm guessing slightly different loadings are involved.

 

I'm helping shunt the sets together tomorrow morning, but I believe the Kirklees engines will have 4 or 5 when solo

 

Sounds a perfectly sensible case of seeing what they can do before they're let loose solo, just in case that only turns out to be blocking the line mid-section! Seems vanishingly unlikely as IIRC, all the Kirklees fleet have seen incremental improvements over the years.

Have any of the KLR locos visited before? For some reason, the example of anything visiting Llanfair Caereinion springs to mind .... the railway loaning a loco generally seem to get something back with some useful ideas on how to improve their charge, if not a loco which has already had the odd tweakette here and there!

 

Each of the two Kirklees locos ("Fox" and "Badger") has done a solo round trip this afternoon successfully with 8 empty coaches. As Steamie Boxes says above, their solo runs during the Gala will be with shorter rakes AIUI. My colleagues will be posting pics from today on "Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway" Facebook page soon, no doubt.

 

I hope this is an appropriate place to post...

I have a collection of Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway Preservation Society Newsletters from 1967 up to around 1999 - is varying condition but mostly very good. Does anyone want to take them off my hands before they go in the recycling?

 

At the risk of being controversial, I paid a first visit to the R &ER for the first time in about 40 years last week, and greatly enjoyed the journey on it - but it didn't move me in a way that I thought it might. It came across as rather soul-less and very much the finished article, with nowhere much to go (or interest in) by way of further development. I couldn't find any guidebooks on sale - or any other literature relating to the railway, including information about the preservation society or how to join it. It was almost as if they don't want support for any future plans. As a general point, is this something we're going to see increasingly from smaller lines in particular when they find that they have reached the limits of their potential? Are there in fact any future development plans for the R&ER?

 

What do you mean by development?

The Ratty is owned privately I think so
A little different from many lines. But, why is the only marker of success a development plan? I get we’ve become used to that, but I look around many places and wonder if the infrastructure built isn’t actually more than can be maintained. I think you might have to get used to most places having more modest ambitions for the foreseeable future.