Not often mentioned in these notes are the activities of our friends on the Apedale site who operate the Apedale Heritage Centre. Besides running a museum with an extensive collection of mining artifacts (and four Moseley Railway Trust locomotives), they also run regular tours into one of the drift mines on site. As you may have read in a recent post (“No Sleep ‘til Apedale”), the area is honeycombed with drift mines. The AHC staff are currently working to re-open an old working which has been partially filled in. But how to dispose of the filling-in material? A glance in the direction of the Moseley Railway Trust’s activities suggested the answer. MRT had a pile of portable track which was at rather a loose end – and thus a new railway was created. There’s no loco haulage – but there is a rather splendid foot crossing where parties exiting the mine have to cross the track.

This is, of course, what the MRT is all about – recreating industrial narrow gauge railways – and here we have a new one, on our doorstep, doing a real job of work. It’s an ephemeral line, but it MAY still be in place for our Open Day on 12 & 13 September. Meanwhile, progress is being made with the Main Line (the Apedale Valley Light Railway) with a large number of ballast trains being run. Mind, as with most railway operations, the civil engineers had to relinquish possession for the afternoon pick-up goods. As ever, contact us here.