Tornado - The Walton Pier Special

[pootle]

To celebrate 150 years of the railway reaching my hometown of Walton-on-the-Naze a steam special hauled by Tornado was arranged for Saturday 12th August. With the train due at 915 and not departing until 9pm that evening it was negotiated with Greater Anglia and Network Rail to run 5 specials from Walton to Colchester Town during the day, giving about 1600 people the chance to experience steam on this branch line for the first time since 1967. Ironically it was also 30 years to the day that an electric unit failed to stop at the station and crashed through the buffers and into the old station building!....happily the weekend's trips were much less impactful!


Tornado- by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (approaching Thorpe-le-Soken Stationfrom Colchester)


Tornado-0189 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (arriving at Platform 2 at Thorpe-le-Soken)


Tornado-0260 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (crossing the Kirby Cross bridge heading to the coast)


Tornado-0160 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (view from the old maltings yard at Thorpe-le-Soken)


Tornado-0264 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (another crossing the Kirby Cross bridge)


Tornado-0189-2 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (arty edit #1)


Tornado-0264-3 by Stewart Oxley, on Flickr (arty edit #2)

Only really steaming heading to the coast, heading to Colchester it was 'dragged' by a Diesel loco from the other end. Great sight and something unusual to see in your everyday surroundings.

Stewart

[FGR2]

Nice shots. I went to Wivenhoe, then took the normal train to Walton to catch it there.

I only realised it was 30 years since the accident when I got home. It was only a week or so after the accident in 1987, that I last visited Walton. I have a picture somewhere of the partly damaged station.

[pootle]

Yes me to....made a right mess of the gents toilets
That was really the start of the end for the station, double track removed, signal box removed, siding taken up.
Now we're having all manned ticket offices replaced with a ticket machine....ah progress!

[speedbird2639]

Now we're having all manned ticket offices replaced with a ticket machine....ah progress!

The alternative would probably be to close the line altogether. They reckon many of the 'Beeching Axe' lines could have stayed open at very little cost if the technology we have today such as electronic ticket machines had been available or if there had been any appetite to adopt ideas such as 'pay on the train'.

But there again we all know that Dr Beeching was just a stooge put in place by the Government to do their bidding as you would expect when the Minister for Transport also owned the company that was winning all the motorway building contracts during the period the Government had set a target to build 1000 miles of motorway by the end of the decade!