The Bristol Railway Archive

Something which has come up on another railway related forum I subscribe to.

Does anybody around here know whether the GWR had running powers over the Midland main line prior to the South Wales Direct railway being opened in 1902?

I can only find a reference post 1908 about joint running powers, the severn bridge to lydney line was a joint affair, i also remember reading about the stone house viaduct being rebuilt and thence after permiting gwr county class over it( not the hawkesworth county), i will have a slower read, not scan of my many local books and re-post.

I suspect the running powers would only have been useful after the GWR opened its own Stratford-Cheltenham line in 1905, enabling GW trains to run from Birmingham to Bristol.

Before that I can't imagine they'd have seriously tried competing with the Midland between Birmingham and Gloucester or Cheltenham; their route would have been either via Worcester and Ledbury or via Banbury and Stow-on-the-Wold - both circuitous and involving single-track branch lines.

I may be a bit wide of the mark, but about 1840 didn't Mr Brunel build the Bristol to Gloucester Railway as a Broad Gauge line, in exchange for giving them running powers into Bristol Temple Meads. It met up with the standard gauge Birmingham to Gloucester Railway at Gloucester. All goods and passengers were transhipped between standard gauge and broad gauge at Gloucester because he didn't want it to happen at Bristol Temple Meads. Something that needed an army of porters and clerks to do. Didn't the GWR later offer to buy the Bristol to Gloucester and the Birmingham to Gloucester Line but their offer was bettered by the Midland Railway (with financial backing from the LNWR) and the two respective boards accepted the Midland offer and the rest is history so to speak. It must have been a huge coup for the Midland not only to have twarted the original plans of Brunel for Broad Gauge to Birmingham and onwards to the North. It gave the Midland a huge step into GW territory to Bristol and to Bath and eventually by the S & D all the way to Bournemouth. This is only really background because I don't know what arrangements the GWR and Midland had in the early twentieth century.

The answer appears to be here, if anybody else is interested

http://semaphore.avonvalleyrailway.org/ ... story.html

All is now clear - just when I thought it was Grandfathers rights