Steam railway in a race against time (From Worcester News)

Steam railway in a race against time

8:50pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in News By Mike Pryce

WORCESTERSHIRE’S Severn Valley Railway is in a race against time to complete a major engineering project by Saturday.

The railway celebrated its 150th anniversary on February 1, not with a special train, but by closing down.

Far from the public gaze, in the normally dark depths of the subterranean 480-yard long Bewdley Tunnel, contractors rather symbolically did exactly what their Victorian forefathers did a century-and-a-half ago by laying down and connecting up new 60ft lengths of track.

Since the SVR’s festive season train services ended on January 3, the 16-mile Kidderminster-to-Bridgnorth heritage line has been on shutdown, engaged upon a major £250,000 civil engineering project to cut new drainage channels in the tunnel, replace and reballast more than a third of a mile of track through the single bore, renew signal cabling and repair the two sandstone portals.

Special ‘forced ventilation’ equipment has been employed to allow workmen to breathe in an atmosphere that would otherwise be polluted by fumes from plant and machinery. It is vital work which brings the railway’s total spend on infrastructure renewals over the last three-and-a-half years to a £1.5 million. Engineers have been working against the clock to get the project completed by Saturday, when steam trains return to the line and the SVR becomes fully operational once again for the schools’ half-term holiday period.

The official celebrations for the 150th anniversary will take place later in the year.

SVR general manager Nick Ralls said: “We are officially celebrating the anniversary on May 19 and 20 with a brand new event – our first ever Victorian Weekend – which, with the help of ‘Queen Victoria’ herself, and some amazing Victorian steam locomotives from the 1860s and 1870s period which we are bringing in specially, will create the mood of the Severn Valley Railway just as it was when it first opened in 1862.”