This article was opened on 11 April 2019,
and was last modified on 1 November 2019
Hastings Diesels Limited’s 76th public railtour began at Hastings and visited London Charing Cross, and non-passenger lines both on the Isle of Grain and at Angerstein Wharf.
This outing was named to honour our recently departed friend and colleague Dave Markwick, who played an active role at Hastings Diesels and at St. Leonards Depot right from the earliest days of our preservation efforts right up to his final day.
Our outward journey harked back to the BR era of our train, with a run up the Hastings Line via Tonbridge and Orpington, and it was supposed to be a ‘fast’ run from Tonbridge to Charing Cross. Unfortunately, while we were held at a red signal at London Bridge, our driver was informed that the train would not be going any further towards Charing Cross because of a planning error, but that we would wait there until the correct time for our path on the next part of the railtour.
Some rapid communications and good teamwork from our partners at GB Railfreight and the station announcers at Charing Cross ensued; and all 60 of our intending passengers who were awaiting us at Charing Cross travelled to London Bridge on other trains and joined us there.
Our fully laden train set off for the Isle of Grain, turning off the London–Hastings route at Hither Green and running via the Dartford Loop (Sidcup) Line and Gravesend to Hoo Junction. There we turned left onto the 11-mile freight-only branch to Cliffe and Grain. Returning towards London, we took the North Kent Line via Abbey Wood and Woolwich Arsenal to reach Angerstein Wharf, on a short freight-only line to an aggregates terminal in the Port of London.
Retracing our steps again, we followed the North Kent Line once more, east through Abbey Wood as far as Slade Green, before turning right onto the Bexleyheath Line, running via Eltham to reach Blackheath, Lewisham, and ultimately London Charing Cross. Thus, in the course of the middle part of this outing we traversed all three Dartford Lines!
At long last we did this time visit Charing Cross as planned. Our return to Hastings was via New Cross Gate and the Brighton Main Line as far as Redhill, then cutting across to Tonbridge via Godstone. Return to Hastings was at the very respectable time of 17:45.
Our train ran faultlessly and kept almost perfectly to time throughout the railtour, though we were unable to capitalise on early running during the return leg because of other trains which were quite reasonably pathed ahead of us at junctions. We covered 232 miles and 38 chains in passenger service, and the railtour was sold out. We ran under cloudy skies for parts of the day, and encountered some light rain in the Redhill area.
The train was formed thus: 60118-60501-69337-70262-60529-60116, with motor coach 60118 Tunbridge Wells leading upon departure from Hastings; because of the intricacies of the route around the Dartford Lines, we had become turned round by the time we approached Charing Cross for the second time, so 60118 led back to Hastings too.
The publicity leaflet and timings remain available, as does the geographic sketch map of our route which was produced for this outing. The actual running times have also been saved.
An annotated extract from Network Rail’s Sectional Appendix was produced for this outing. We are aware that our precise actual route (i.e. which track we traversed on certain complex areas of layout) may be at variance with the pre-guessed route shown here in a few places; these will be corrected in due course as the cab video footage is prepared.
We mounted unattended unmonitored forward-facing cameras in both cabs of the train, and recorded the forward view for the entire outing from Hastings back to Hastings via Grain.
For the middle part of the journey there was more than one member of staff in the cab (a route-conductor) making the leading-cab soundtrack unusable for our purposes, so we have also recorded audio from the rear cab which will be precisely synchronised and combined with the video footage where necessary.
We haven’t prepared the footage yet (see our YouTube channel for other such footage); we will get to it in due course, once the backlog of previous material has been worked through. It will then be linked from this page as well as freely searchable via our YouTube channel.
Various photographers have taken video-footage depicting this railtour and have uploaded it to YouTube; the following are links to some starting-points but do not represent a definitive collection:
Orpington / Crayford / Abbey Wood / Barnehurst / London Bridge / Wadhurst
Climbing the 1 in 47 towards Somerhill Tunnel (after Tonbridge)
Photos on this page were taken by Richard Griffin unless otherwise stated.