The lines that would not close: The world of heritage railways

Across Britain, the Isle of Man and Ireland, 100's of heritage railways are kept running by people who decided, at some point in the past seventy-five years, that a closed line was not the same thing one condemned to history. A new map by Mapelio shows the location of some of the most notable heritage railways one single fine art print.

In the summer of 1950 the owner of a slate railway in mid-Wales died, and with him went the last good reason for it to exist. The Talyllyn Railway had carried quarrymen and their output between Abergynolwyn and the coast at Tywyn since the 1860s. By then it had two ageing locomotives, a handful of carriages and track that stayed in place more from habit than engineering.

The engineer and writer Tom Rolt thought it worth saving, and so did a small group of people he gathered in a Birmingham hotel that autumn. The society they formed ran its first trains in May 1951. Nobody had tried this before. A railway, until then, was something owned by a company or the state and run for money; the Talyllyn became something run by its admirers, for reasons that were harder to put on a balance sheet.

One of the early volunteers was a clergyman named Wilbert Awdry, who went home and wrote the line, thinly disguised, into a series of children's books. The rest of the idea spread more quietly, and much further.

A habit of refusal

In 1960 two standard-gauge lines followed Wales's lead within months of each other. In Sussex, the Bluebell Railway reopened a stretch of branch line that British Railways had given up on. In Leeds, students and enthusiasts took on the Middleton Railway, a colliery line authorised by Act of Parliament in 1758 and with a fair claim to being the oldest working railway in the world.

Then came the 1960s proper, and supply caught up with demand. The Beeching report of 1963 recommended closing thousands of miles of track and a third of the network's stations. Steam was withdrawn from British Railways altogether in August 1968. Within a few years the country was left with a great deal of abandoned trackbed, a great many redundant engines and a generation of people who had grown up with both and did not see why that should be the end of it.

Much of what the map records is the long consequence of that decade. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway and the Severn Valley Railway both run over routes British Rail abandoned in the 1960s. Others never closed in the ordinary sense because they were never part of the national network at all: estate lines, quarry lines, seaside tramways, and in one case the Post Office's own narrow-gauge railway beneath the streets of London.

Reading the map

Seen together, the 179 railways highlighted in our new map shows the geographical location in a way that can be visualised in print.

Of the 179, England accounts for 135 of them, Wales 18, Scotland 11, Ireland nine and the Isle of Man six.

Those are raw numbers, and they flatter England's size more than its devotion. The Isle of Man, an island about thirty miles from end to end, keeps six heritage lines and not one of them is standard gauge. There is a horse-drawn tram on the promenade at Douglas, an electric line along the east coast and another that climbs Snaefell, the island's only mountain.

Wales tells a different story again. Thirteen of its eighteen railways are narrow gauge, which is what slate country required: lines laid tight to steep valley sides, built to bring stone down to the harbours at Porthmadog, Tywyn and Aberdovey. The Ffestiniog, the Talyllyn, the Corris and the Vale of Rheidol sit within a short drive of one another, and on the map they cluster like a small archipelago along Cardigan Bay.

The topography underneath does much of the explaining. Nineteen of the railways on the map carry the word "Valley" in their names, from the Aln in Northumberland to the Teifi in Ceredigion, because railways, like rivers, went where the ground allowed. Lay the pins over relief and the routes make sense in a way they never do on a road atlas.

Then there are the oddities, which are half the pleasure. Volk's Electric Railway has run along Brighton seafront since 1883, longer than any other electric railway still operating. In Listowel, County Kerry, a reconstructed stretch of the Lartigue monorail recalls a line that ran to Ballybunion, its trains balanced astride a single elevated rail, until 1924.

Some inclusions invite a harder question. The Snowdon Mountain Railway was never rescued by anyone: it opened in 1896 as a commercial venture, built by Victorian investors to carry tourists to the summit, and it has carried them, for a fare, ever since.

Therefore, is a line that was conceived as an attraction, and has never stopped being one, a heritage railway at all?

Making the map

The map began with a simple observation: for all the books, timetables and society magazines devoted to heritage railways, there was very little in the way of location maps that are able to be hung on a wall.

What does exist tends to be online and the aim here was to create a single, accurate picture of heritage railways, drawn with the care usually reserved for the landscapes the lines run through.

It was designed in our Cotswolds studio on a topographical base, with map data used to place each pin where the railway actually is rather than where a town name suggests it might be. In some instance, particularly where the line is quite long, a terminus station is chosen as the location (which end of the line it marks is often determined by number of pins in a given area (The Welsh Highland Line is a prime example...!).

Around the map, the railways are listed alphabetically within each country, so the print works as a handy reference as well as a beautiful piece of artwork.

Each pin falls into one of four categories: standard gauge, narrow gauge, tramway or museum.

Many sites are not so tidy. Where a single location runs more than one gauge, the pin follows whichever is most prominent there. Deciding which was most prominent, and whether a museum with a short demonstration line counts as a museum or a railway, accounted for a good deal of the work, and the debates will continue long after you read this article.

The finished map measures 24 by 32 inches. It is giclée printed on 200gsm matt fine art paper and is available unframed or in a solid wood frame in black, dark brown, natural or white.

What is not on it

Any reader who knows this world will find something to dispute, and that is as it should be.

The map is not an exhaustive register, nor does it claim any authority. Heritage railways resist precise definition. Is a fifteen-inch-gauge line in a seaside park a railway or an amusement? Does a restoration group with a shed, a locomotive and a few hundred yards of track qualify yet? Lines close, reopen, extend and merge, and a list made in one season is slightly wrong by the next.

What the map offers instead is a sense of scale. Most people, asked to guess how many of these railways exist, would name a dozen and suggest perhaps fifty. To see 179 of them spread across Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man, almost every one sustained by volunteers, is to see one of the largest voluntary undertakings in these islands for what it is.

We've made the full list of locations we're plotted available for anyone to view, and suggestions for railways that ought to be on it are welcome. Some will make a future edition.

A map for all

This map is dedicated to anyone who has spent a wet afternoon on a station platform watching a tank engine run round its train, for enthusiasts who travel the length of the country to make a gala day, and for those devoted friends, partners, children and relatives who support, and even encourage, them in so many ways!

The UK, Isle of Man & Ireland Heritage Railway Map is available from Mapelio as a framed print or fine art poster.