Miniature Railway - Issue 1

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Book Review Dorset & Somerset Narrow Gauge

PHOTO:J K Williams

The

remarkable Secundus worked in the Isle of Purbeck for many years and is now on display at Corfe Castle railway station

We’ve all done it - you take a photograph of something that interests you,or perhaps it just happens to get into the corner of a family photograph,and then you forget all about it.Fifty years later the subject matter is long gone and long forgotten, sometimes with only the sketchiest record of how and why it ever existed.This is often the case with industrial narrow gauge railways,which had a tendency to spring up and disappear almost overnight.Some served military installations and were thus little photographed,while others were such an everyday part of the industrial scene that almost no one thought to record their presence until it was too late. The Middleton Press is currently scouring the country,putting together volumes of narrow gauge photographs on a regional basis,and the latest to appear is Dorset & Somerset.Predictably,there is a longer list of lines of which no known photographs survive,than there are well documented examples,and many of those that have been recorded exist only as grainy black & white prints.Many of these were snapped or unearthed by dedicated enthusiasts,who were aware by the 1950s and ‘60s that a whole landscape of narrow gauge lines was about to disappear for ever. And what photographs they are! Wobbly tracks disappear into the underbrush,Heath Robinson-inspired diesel locomotives potter back and forth with ramshackle wagons, while magnificent steam locomotives sizzle in the sunshine,their drivers posing proudly

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Miniature Railway 1