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A few photos showing how track replacement was carried out in the 80's, before the introduction of Track Renewel Machines and Ballast Cleaners... Maghull station - Sun 22nd July 1984
08924 and it's track crane lifts sections of old track while the PW gang take a breather. The old wooden sleepers will be replaced with concrete ones..
Stagecoach Gold Enviro 400 10772 (SN66 VYT) was a surprise performer on rail replacement between Havant and Barnham yesterday morning 26th October, 2019.
Replacement Bus Hire, Copthorne, Mercedes Benz Citaro C26 RBH in Haywards Heath today 10th October, 2026, on Rail Replacement to Plumpton and Lewes. It was new to Blackpool Transport as 552 (BJ15 GOP).
Abellio London 9510 is an A/D Enviro400 on rail replacement work for LNWR seen at Hemel Hempstead station.
It was back to Basingstoke today (12/01/2025) for another look at the rail replacement operation with an impressive 13 departures an hour. A bit of a Barnes-fest certainly added brightness to an otherwise grey day.
The rather inclement weather had me pondering whether or not to venture out to Basingstoke today (05/01/2025) but in the end curiosity won again! A good few captures here for you to enjoy.
Hamilton Square station in Birkenhead has closed for the next several months while it undergoes a complete refurbishment. The rather depressing chocolate-brown plastic panelling is to be replaced, presumably by the much brighter white material as per the recent renovation of most of the Liverpool stations on the Loop Line. Trains to and from Liverpool continue to run through the station without stopping.
Stagecoach has picked up the rail replacement contract, providing service between Hamilton Square, Birkenhead Central and Conway Park. Suitably adorned, but wearing a very outdated cinema advertisement West Ham garage codes and 'Year of the Bus' roundels, Stagecoach Merseyside 17494 (LX51FMP) sets off from beneath Hamilton Square station's imposing accumulator tower.
It was a busy day of rail replacement bus services at Basingstoke on Sunday 29/11/2020 with the SWR main line to Woking severed and the GWR line to Reading also blocked. This meant it was buses and coaches running Basingstoke-Guildford-Woking fasts, Basingstoke-Woking all stations then onto Weybridge, Basingstoke-Reading fast (for Cross Country) and finally Basingstoke-Reading all stations.
All this produced around 40 different vehicles working on the services and there proved to be a good mix of interesting stuff!
East Lancs developed the Kinetic body for MAN chassis in 2006. The single-deck version was based upon its established Esteem bodywork but retained MAN's "Lion's City" front. Sales were not significant, and other than a demonstrator, only 16 were built, and these were all for Stagecoach's Scottish operations.
Despite having its UK headquarters in Swindon, MAN's demonstrator curiously received a Swansea registration mark - CU56 AVP.
After a period on demonstration duties, she was operated for a few years by Scottish operator Whitelaws of Stonehouse. New Adventure Travel purchased her in October 2013.
She was allocated to Pontypridd depot and was usually found operating on the local services and Service X38 (Pontypridd-Bragoed). It was in Bargoed that I caught upo with in June 2015, though she was operating a Rail Replacement service on the Rhymney Valley line.
There was certainly a good variety of vehicles running through Basingstoke on rail replacement duties today (Good Friday 2023). The sun made an appearance which was good to see as well!
Seen on Tyne & Wear Metro replacement 19/03/22.
New to Metroline London Northern but returned to Dawson Group after just over 7 years.
Apparently sat at Dawson Group for 4 years before joining the JH fleet in September 2014.
Our cat died a few months ago and I haven't quite gotten around to committing to getting a new cat yet, much to my wife and kids dismay. So, my oldest daughter had my wife search for LEGO cats and then had me help her build this. The design is Tyler Clites.
Go Ahead London General DOE36 LX58CYF working the Thameslink rail Replacement service from Herne Hill to Beckenham Junction
Kicking off 2026 was a trip to Basingstoke on Sunday 4th January to witness the rail replacement buses running to Andover, Farnborough, Reading, Winchester and Woking. With 11 departures every hour, something interesting was bound to turn up sooner or later. Being sufficiently west of London, Basingstoke is predominantly 'coach country' rather than say, east of Woking where it's almost all buses running the rail replacement services.
Today's delights were a pair VDL Futuras from Star Tours of Wembley, a JKT International Irizar, a pair of former Excelsior Plaxton Elites now sporting Damory branding, the Barnes '100 Years' coach which has now been repainted into full fleet livery, and a pair of Mayflower Scania deckers. It was good to see the Mayflower pair back on the road again after the devastating vandal attack that crippled the fleet back in November 2025.
In total, 36 buses and coaches from 20 different operators passed our cameras in our 3 hour visit with Aldermaston Coach Lines and Barnes providing 5 each.
The rather inclement weather had me pondering whether or not to venture out to Basingstoke today (05/01/2025) but in the end curiosity won again! A good few captures here for you to enjoy.
66594 yings away as it idles at Waverton whilst on Sunday engineering duties on the Cumbrian coast line.
Meanwhile 56078 has a crafty smoke whilst awaiting departure for Carlisle yard with spent ballast and redundant track panels.
The closure of the Great Western main line around the north Bristol area on a number of weekends in October 2017 has seen a major rail replacement programme between Cardiff and Bristol Parkway, and between Newport and Bristol Parkway.
First West of England is one of the operators covering the Newport service, and has rostered a number of Alexander Dennis Enviro400 MMCs with light blue and tangerine fronts, in the same way that they were allocated to the major rail replacement programme in South Wales over Christmas and New Year 2016/2017.
33797 is one of the light blue fronted examples, usually used on Services 48 and 49 in Bristol, and is captured arriving at the Old Green Interchange in Newport in mid October 2017.
Well, the long anticipated "Woking Weekender" finally arrived and delivered a magnificent array of vehicles operating rail replacement services out to Weybridge, Guildford, Aldershot and Basingstoke throughout both days. No less than 34 different operators provided in excess of 70 buses, coaches and minibuses across both days including three 75-plates. And Burrows Coaches had "both" their East Lancs Darts out - EDIT - STOP PRESS! On Saturday it was LK55ADX and on Sunday it was J8UFX - first with the news!!
Now then, Woking is not the photographer's friend at this time of year due to high-rise office blocks surrounding the station area. Saturday started wet, eased off but remained rather gloomy all day, and Sunday was almost a write-off with clear blue skies and low sun. The one sunny spot we found came with a time limit as a ruddy great big lamppost shadow edged its way into shot therefore limiting use of that corner. All in all though, it proved to be a belter!! Maybe have it in the Spring next time please Network Rail?
Former Tyrers Coaches 2002 is seen at Broxbourne on Greater Anglia rail replacement to Bishops Stortford.
Vehicle Details
Operator: Angies Tours
Registration: YN56FAM
Vehicle: N230UB Scania OmniCity
We saw this on our way to morning - it replaced the one in this photo: www.flickr.com/photos/thadz/13633175023/ . Apparently, the owner of the store was issued a citation for the larger one and vowed to defy the county and not take it down. Can you say "Meow"?
Day 132 of my 365 Project
Following a freight derailment on the Lickey Incline, there was considerable activity at Bromsgrove over the weekend of 17/18 November to rectify the infrastructure damage suffered and restore the line for services to resume. This view taken south of the station shows Class 37/0 37230 waiting with new sleepers to be postioned once the trackbed near the base of the incline was ready. The Bromsgrove Oil Terminal provided the back scene.
All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse
Well, the long anticipated "Woking Weekender" finally arrived and delivered a magnificent array of vehicles operating rail replacement services out to Weybridge, Guildford, Aldershot and Basingstoke throughout both days. No less than 34 different operators provided in excess of 70 buses, coaches and minibuses across both days including three 75-plates. And Burrows Coaches had "both" their East Lancs Darts out - EDIT - STOP PRESS! On Saturday it was LK55ADX and on Sunday it was J8UFX - first with the news!!
Now then, Woking is not the photographer's friend at this time of year due to high-rise office blocks surrounding the station area. Saturday started wet, eased off but remained rather gloomy all day, and Sunday was almost a write-off with clear blue skies and low sun. The one sunny spot we found came with a time limit as a ruddy great big lamppost shadow edged its way into shot therefore limiting use of that corner. All in all though, it proved to be a belter!! Maybe have it in the Spring next time please Network Rail?
If you live in the UK, you will recognise the horror of the Replacement Bus Service. You think you will be travelling by train, but end up in a bus facing traffic jams, roadworks and pot holes. Not fun. But she is sitting very prettily on her suitcase!
St Michael, Woolverstone, Suffolk
It was a crisp, bright morning towards the end of November 2016, a perfect day for a bike ride. I headed out of town onto the Shotley Peninsula, the first stretch of my journey necessarily along the horrid main road which runs along the south bank of the Orwell. I soon came to Woolverstone, which you can see at once was rebuilt as a late 19th Century estate village. A narrow lane runs between fields and copses northwards to the church of St Michael sitting on its mound above the river.
The setting is idyllic. The great pile of Woolverstone Hall, today home to Ipswich Girls High School, stands beside it, and above me the jackdaws chattered in the skeletal trees, the fields were full of sheep, the damp woods full of the cries of pheasants. Woolverstone Hall was built in the 1770s by John Johnson for William Berners. Johnson had been the main architect of the Berners Estate, an area of London known more commonly today as Fitzrovia, and the fabulously wealthy Berners family took up residence in this remote Suffolk spot above the Orwell. They paid for George Gilbert Scott's restoration of the 1860s, which is pretty much all that can be seen of the church from the south apart from the tower, but in the 1880s they did rather more. James Piers St Aubyn, one of the most famous architects of the day, was brought in to expand the church massively towards the north, and when you enter you see that the effect is really that of two churches side by side, separated by a fairly low and rounded arcade. The new part was designed to be used for shadowy, incense-led worship, and although that tradition has long gone it is still the main part of the church today.
The wealth of the Berners family means that the restoration was overwhelming, but the quality of it is high. And in any case, there are few medieval survivals anywhere on the Shotley Peninsula. The only old object here is the font, and it is a curiosity. On the face of it, the style is that of a typical East Anglian font bowl, lions alternating with angels, but the carving is quite unlike anything I've seen elsewhere, the crouching lions shown in profile. Pevsner calls the carving 'crude', which is not untrue. Was it done by a local hand, perhaps? It has been reset on a modern stem with upright, alert little lions, 19th Century but much more in the East Anglian medieval style.
The glass is also generally of high quality, or at least expensive, and to various members of the Berners family. Heaton Butler & Bayne's rather alarmingly yellow Saints Martin, Agnes, Margaret and Augustine, installed as a memorial to Archdeacon Henry Berners and his wife, stand proudly in an overwhelmingly wide south nave window which works externally as a kind of optical illusion, making Scott's nave appear wider than his chancel, which it isn't.
The same firm provided the east window in St Aubyn's north aisle to John and Henrietta Berners, which depicts the crucifixion flanked by Joseph of Arimathea, the Blessed Virgin, St John and St Mary Magdalene. It is interesting to note, given the not uncommon conflation of their imagery in medieval times, the similarity between the figures of St John and St Mary Magdalene. The studio might almost have been working from the same cartoon. Both the windows were installed in the 1880s under St Aubyn's direction.
There was once an earler 19th Century window at Gilbert Scott's east end, of which the upper tracery survives, but the main lights were destroyed by blast damage during the Second World War, a not uncommon fate for church windows on the Shotley Peninsula - indeed, the church in the neighbouring village, Chelmondiston, was completely ruined. The 1947 replacement, by AL Wilkinson, depicts Christ the Saviour of the World flanked by St Michael and St Gabriel.
The High Church, even Anglo-catholic, enthusiasms of the Berners family may be judged by Woolverstone House back in the village, which was built for a community of Anglican nuns based at St Peter, Kilburn. It was intended as their retreat house and school, and the architect was Edwin Lutyens. Today it is a private house, but the church is now open every day. When I'd first visited every Suffolk church in the late 1990s I had found it locked. Coming back in 2006, the interior was full of scaffolding, and I couldn't go in. Curiously, the avenue of yew trees which lined the path up to the south porch at that time have now been reduced to stumps. Despite St Michael being barely five miles from my house, it had taken until this idyllic crisp, sunny day in late November 2016 for me to get back there, discover this, and explore the inside for the first time.
It was time to head on to Harkstead. The view from the south porch back up the hilly lane was breathtaking in the low winter sunshine. I stepped out, wandering down to the east to look across to the Hall. The Berners family sold it as part of the Estate in 1937, assuming that it would be demolished for farming land, but after a period of requisition by the army during the War the Hall was bought by the London County Council for use as a boarding school. It was intended both for children taken into care and also for those whose parents were working overseas, an odd combination, but people seem to have happy memories of it. The writer Ian McEwan is a famous ex-pupil. The school closed in the 1980s; its massive library was broken up, and you still regularly come across items from it in Suffolk's second-hand bookshops. In a grand sale in the Ipswich Corn Exchange shortly after the closure, I bought the school's copies of McEwan's books for 50p each. The Hall lay empty for several years, until the Girls High School moved out here from central Ipswich, and restored it to something like its former glory. The jackdaws which inhabit the great 19th Century water tower which stands beside it wheeled above my head as I cycled back to the Shotley road.
A few photos showing how track replacement was carried out in the 80's, before the introduction of Track Renewel Machines and Ballast Cleaners... Maghull station - Sun 22nd July 1984
The PW gang dig the ballast in place and check the levels and gauge. 40044 can be seen in the background
On the 28th of August 2022, Hillsbus Foundry Road’s m/o 9517 (Volgren CR228L/Scania K310UB 14.5m) is seen at Central on trackwork route 31T1 to Penrith
all our town bridges were destroyed or damaged two years ago in the worst floods we have ever known , this is the first one to be replaced. l think it looks like a mini Sydney Harbour Bridge..........lol