This article was opened on 18 September 2019
Hastings Diesels Limited’s 79th public railtour was to Salisbury, and to the Ministry of Defence site at Ludgershall on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border.
This railtour began at Hastings, served the usual stations to Tonbridge then Redhill and Guildford. It ran in a large circular route via Reading, the Berks & Hants Line to Westbury, and via Warminster to Salisbury; in the evening it returned to Guildford and thence Hastings by way of Romsey, Chandler’s Ford, Eastleigh, Botley, Fareham, Havant, and the Portsmouth Direct line through Petersfield.
After our lunchtime arrival at Salisbury, however, we went on a 49-mile side-trip up the West of England Line towards Basingstoke, as far as Andover. There we changed direction and headed up a line which closed to passengers on 9 September 1961: the Midland & South Western Junction Railway (M&SWJR) line between Andover and Swindon. This 7-mile stub to MoD Ludgershall has remained open for non-passenger traffic ever since. Our train was the first passenger-carrying train to visit MoD Ludgershall for some time — indeed, the first railtour to enter MoD land since at least 2013. A description of our visit to the facility was kindly written for our passengers beforehand.
Over 40 passengers joined the train at Salisbury on purpose to take in this visit, after which we again reversed at Andover and returned to Salisbury.
The weather was sunny and warm without being unbearably hot: a perfect September day.
Our train ran faultlessly, and the railtour was free of incident and largely to time throughout. A check at signal T2805 on the Reading Feeder Relief road while a freight train crossed over ahead lost us 6 minutes, some which we clawed back while also climbing over Savernake Summit — where, incidentally, the disused M&SWJR line to Swindon crossed above us. We again lost some time at signal checks on the homeward run, including 10 minutes sat at signal E32 approaching Eastleigh, and again at signal E827 awaiting the single-line section through the Funtley Tunnels between Botley and Fareham; these were because of serious disruption to the SWR network because of a trespass incident in the Surbiton area. Recovery-time in the timetable, and a quick turnaround at Guildford facilitated by a change of driver, meant that we were back on time by Dorking Deepdene.
The train was formed thus: 60118-60501-69337-70262-60529-60116, with motor coach 60116 Mountfield leading upon departure from Hastings; thanks to the circular route and additional reversal at Guildford on the return leg, the train returned to Hastings in the same orientation.
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.
To further illustrate the detail of our route, annotated extracts from Network Rail’s Sectional Appendix have been produced for the outward and return legs of this outing (updated 14 August). We are aware that our precise actual route (i.e. which track we traversed on certain complex areas of layout) might 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 from Hastings to Tonbridge; from Redhill via Reading, Westbury and Salisbury to Andover; from Andover to Ludgershall and back (but specifically excluding the MoD site on which photography was not permitted); Andover to Salisbury; and Salisbury to Guildford via Chandler’s Ford and Botley (it was getting dark by about Havant).
For parts 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:
Photos on this page were taken by Richard Griffin unless otherwise stated.