East Suffolk Light Railway and Southwold Railway.

Whilst on holiday in Suffolk last year, I paid another visit to the East Anglia Transport Museum and had a look at their East Suffolk Light Railway 2' gauge line. A few pictures are on Flickr if anyone would like to have a look and this is the link :

https://www.flickr.com/photos/train-pix/sets/72157647895820033/

I also had a little look around the embryonic Southwold Railway and there are a few pictures here :

https://www.flickr.com/photos/train-pix/sets/72157645118405289/

Hope they're of interest.

 

Thanks for posting! All pics of NG lines of interest

 

Thanks for sharing these. It would be amazing to see the Southwold Railway restored, or part of it. After the Welsh Highland revival, all things are possible!

John

 

They've got a bit of an uphill struggle, but who knows...

 

Not all that uphill, in East Anglia?

John

 

Ho, ho!

 

Lovely pictures, Ron. Was there any sign of the Isle of Man stock at Southwold (frames of number 7 'Tynwald' and ex-MNR Cleminson N42)?

 

You'd be surprised! There was a sharp gradient at the Halesworth end of the Southwold Railway, and locos would frequently stall, in which case assistance was provided by a pair of shunting horses from Halesworth GER station.

 

Now that would be fun to reproduce

 

New build replica horses...

 

I didn't know that there was any IoM stock at Southwold. You learn something new every day!

 

Pictures here on their blog: http://www.southwoldrailway.co.uk/wordpress/?p=411

 

Learning one new thing every day, I may eventually become wise. Thanks for that.

John

 

The Southwold rebuild is not going to happen, Southwold has been taken over by Londoners and no locals live there now, they will block any attempt to disrupt their weekend holiday properties.

 

Probably true that a total rebuild of the original Southwold Railway is unlikely. The trust seem to be concentrating on a replica station and visitor centre at Wenhaston these days, with a view to operating a new build Sharp Stewart there. The lack of support from residents over the years puzzles me; visiting or living in Southwold is like going back in time, that's the attraction, and you'd think a sweet little steam train would fit in nicely.

http://www.southwoldrailway.co.uk/index.php

 

They're the same kind of Islington idiots who tried to prevent the reopening of the Welsh Highland. They've spent a lot of money on moving somewhere where they can live among 'nice people' with 'nice manners', and they'll fight tooth and nail against any proposal which might open up their little white settler colonies to the masses, or benefit the locals whom they are trying to drive out.

 

I have a soft spot for the Southwold Railway, having farmed close to its former route for many years. It seems, to me, a pity that the revivalists have made such a hash of things, right from the start. First, they came up with a scheme for total rebuilding between Halesworth and Southwold. Apart from this being over-ambitious and totally non-viable, much of the line was to be diverted from the original route onto the north bank of the Blyth, bringing it into close proximity with Reydon, a "suburb" of Southwold consisting largely of bungalows occupied by relatively wealthy retirees- classic NIMBY country. When this plan failed, they came back with another, for a short stretch of track and a visitor centre, but now the locals and the planning authority had been alerted and were wary. So now they have produced a third proposal, for a replica station building and stretch of track at Wenhaston. Had this plan been put forward to begin with, it would have had a good chance of being approved, but now they are being forced to accept planning conditions which will ensure that, if it ever gets built, this scheme will struggle for economic survival. Wenhaston is out in the sticks; a visitor attraction located there without any provision for car parking is a dead duck!

 

I totally agree, and despite working in Reydon for the best part of ten years I kept well clear of the Southwold Railway group because I thought they were making such a mess of their relations with the local population.
Most new preservation schemes rent an old station site, fill it full of 'junk', and after a decade or two are running a short section of line with Santa trains and the like. The locals think they are eccentric but grow to see them as part of the local landscape and eventually regard them with affection. This is a good basis on which to extend the route.
The Southwold group on the other hand seemed to think they could 'emulate the Welsh Highland' by starting from cold and getting hold of lots of government money. This ignores the facts that North Wales had had fifty years or more to get used to the idea of narrow gauge tourist railways and that crucially Caernarfon was a highly depressed area which would benefit from government and EU investment.
Coastal Suffolk (Lowestoft excepted) is very far from economically needy. A large number of Southwold and Reydon residents don't want more tourists, and if you plan to build a brand new railway through a nature reserve, well, that just waves a red flag in front of a bull!
It seems to me that the Southwold Railway supporters had absolutely no understanding of psychology. As Flaman says above, they couldn't have upset the local residents more if they had actually set out with that in mind.

 

You're all not getting it Southwold isn't a sleepy little old place in rural Suffolk that needs its former Railway to revitalise its local area economy,its a playground for the rich media types and is a pastiche of its former self, where on a Sunday night everyone packs up and goes home to London having spent the weekend walking around the town clutching a shepherds crook wearing a farmers hat [ I kid you not ] It wouldn't matter what the Southwold Railway group put forward It would be squashed flat.
Perhaps this will help you.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-47752123.html
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-47307223.html

 

"Now, d'yew keep yar hair on, bor!", as the remaining natives in that area might say. Martin Coombs and I agree with you!

Southwold is, indeed, an odd place, it was when I moved to the Halesworth area over 40 years ago. I was one of a small group of enthusiasts at Halesworth in the 70s & 80s who discussed (usually in the BR signal box!) the possibility of a SR revival of some sort, but we were thinking in terms of the Halesworth end of the line, 7 or 8 miles from Southwold. We deliberately avoided Southwold itself, due partly to the impossibility of finding a suitable and affordable site, but also because of the danger of stirring up opposition among the ranks of retired officers, thespians and people you'd seen on the telly. My point is that something like the current Wenhaston plan, small in scale and 6 miles from the "sacred" island of Southwold, (it is, technically, an island, which makes it's residents even more isolationist!) might have been accepted some years ago, but the Southwold Railway Trust went about things in entirely the wrong way, unnecessarily stirring-up opposition in Southwold and Reydon and thereby creating suspicion as to their motives among communities further inland. The pity is that they have probably queered the pitch for any future revival scheme.

Until, perhaps, 20 years ago, a railway preservation scheme in a rural area, if carefully presented, would generally be accepted by the neighbours and the planners. Preservationists were seen as harmless eccentrics and elderly lady councillors would say "it will be a lovely place to take the grandchildren." Then something changed; was it the HS1 controversy, or high property values? Anyway, a railway of any sort is now seen, by neighbouring residents, as an actual or potential threat and this applies in any area which is not economically deprived, not just Southwold.

If you need proof of how the difficulties can be overcome, look at Suffolk's only Heritage Railway, the Mid-Suffolk Light at Brockford. When they applied for planning permission, they immediately ran into opposition from a very small group of residents and, therefore, the planners. The railway society persevered, managed to get permission for a small scale development, worked hard for 20 years and succeeded in building a small, but good and professional- looking attraction, which has since won awards and become widely acclaimed. The Local Authority now sees the railway as an asset and has allowed them to extend, in spite of the protests of the "antis". Something similar could have happened to the Southwold Railway, but I'm afraid that opportunity has been lost.