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Tag: History

Published on Leave a comment on More railways rediscovered: the High Dyke Branch

Need to shake off the winter blues?

Why not rediscover the High Dyke Branch!

Surely, following our recent spell of Siberian weather, spring will soon be in the air.  If you fancy getting out and about while rediscovering some railway heritage let our new page, The High Dyke Branch Rediscovered - Part 1, be your guide.

John Pegg will show you the first 3 miles of the former branch line, from Highdyke Junction to the Great North Road near Colsterworth.  There's a great selection of photographs .  Most show scenes taken in summer 2017 but, mixed in, are some 'flashbacks' to the 1960s and the early 1970s when the line was still moving heavy loads of ironstone to the main line, the job it was built for in 1916-19.

So why not find your boots, burn off a few excess calories and clear away the cobwebs?

...and look out for Part 2 soon.

Published on Leave a comment on Stoke signal box

For our latest new page we move to one of the boundaries of the Tracks through Grantham 'sphere of interest' in terms of railway geography and infrastructure.

'Stoke Bank' is a legendary location, comprehensively written into East Coast Main Line history as one of the world's most renowned railway racing stretches where speed records have been made and broken.

But what about the signal box at the start of the descent (or, equally, at the summit of the ascent from both directions)?  Many a train timer's stopwatch has clicked there, but few travellers spared much of a thought for the men on duty at Stoke box as they sped past.  Many a loco crew, short of steam on a poor engine, have been thankful when the gradient changed from adverse to favourable as they exchanged a wave with the signalman at the isolated outpost.

Derek Steptoe's evocative memories of the box introduce a fine selection of photographs by Mike Mather and Noel Ingram.

Published on

Fred Harris joined the railway at Grantham in August 1955.  He achieved promotion to driver nearly 30 years later in April 1985, hence the title of the story of his working life on the railway.  Read how a youthful Fred and his driver peered into dense fog one night from the footplate of a slowly advancing 'Tango', looking for signals that were no longer there.  How does a footplate crew respond as a 'Green Arrow' begins to self-destruct at speed on the East Coast Main Line?  Enjoy with Fred a week away at Bridgnorth refreshing his steam skills.  All this and more in our latest new page.

Published on Leave a comment on Ironstone Mining Rediscoveries

Keeping an eye on the user statistics for Tracks Through Grantham we're used to seeing an occasional surge in interest when we publish a new page.  However, around the middle of July there was a sudden spike in our viewing figures which wasn't set off by new content.  It was thanks to a favourable mention on RMweb of our Railways Rediscovered pages (about the former Woolsthorpe Branch) that, for a period of three days we practically trebled our normal readership.*  If you'd like to see what the RMweb contributors had to say you can find the start of the thread here.

Also recently, Richard Marshall was in touch, leaving a comment on our page The Woolsthorpe Branch Rediscovered – Part 2 and subsequently he sent us some photographs of a building which was connected with the ironstone quarries and remains standing today, near Harston.  You can discover the building by scrolling down to near the bottom of this page.

(* We should clarify that the site stats do not tell us who our users are.  They give the total number of views of each page per day and some indication of how those users have found Tracks through Grantham.)

Published on Leave a comment on Touring Rural Railway Byways

We've said before that often we can't predict where the next idea for a new page on Tracks Through Grantham will appear.

When we showed a page from the Railways Rediscovered section of the Tracks Through Grantham website at our last meeting in Grantham, it led to a short discussion about rail tours which visited the various former ironstone branches, and about which lines had been travelled over on which tours.

In the few weeks since then we've been on the trail of information and photographs, which are assembled in our latest page Rail Tour Rambles round Grantham.

Published on Leave a comment on Grantham Railway Timeline

We have just added a "Grantham Railway Timeline" to record interesting and notable events in and around the area. This covers the period from 1850 to the present day. We still have lots of gaps to fill in so if you have anything "interesting and notable" that we could perhaps include within this section and want to share it, then just let us know - use the 'Comment' box below. Here's a link to the page.