Category: Overseas

A little known former railway in London was the 6.5 mile long underground railway built by the Post Office, to carry mails between sorting offices in London. Opened in 1927, the line closed in 2003 due to the uneconomic cost of running the system.

In 2017, a short section of the system in the form of a loop opened as a tourist attraction as part of the Postal Museum, carrying passengers on the system for the first time (the P.O. railway was for mail only and was operated by driverless trains).

I visited this in 2018 and last weekend, I returned for a different experience on the system – a guided walking tour through the same section of the system that is operated by the Postal Museum.

The walking tour starts off at the same point as the railway trip (the walking tour takes place in the evening after the tour trains have stopped running). Participants are equipped with hard hats and hi viz (the former necessary as the tunnels are quite low as they were built for driverless trains).

At stations, the typical layout was a line adjacent to a low platform, located beneath the relevant sorting office overhead, with a diamond crossover midway for ease of access from the adjacent running line.

At one point in the walk, there is an abandoned smaller tunnel veering off to the right. This was an access tunnel to a point where decommissioned stock was dumped – many of these remaining on site today.

Overall, this addition to the tour offerings by the Postal Museum is worth doing if you get a chance and supports the charity keeping this unique piece of London infrastructure open to the public.

I came across this video on Youtube of a former water tower in Hertfordshire, England, which has been converted to a home.

The Smithsonian magazine site has an interesting article about a 3D rendering of 2 female skeletons found in a chert mine* in what is now modern day Czech Republic.

The bones of the skeletons were carbon dated to between 4050 and 4340 B.C.E., making them 6,000 years old.

* Chert was used to make stone tools and weapons

Thanks to a Youtube video, I became aware of this building in Oslo, Norway, which is student accommodation in a converted grain silo.

I was in Dresden over the bank holiday weekend, for the express purpose of visiting the Dresden Danglebahn, sorry, Schwebebahn.

Schwebebahn are suspension railway, of which there are a few in Germany. There is the more famous Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which I visited in 2023 and there is the Dresden Schwebebahn, which is, in some ways, more interesting, being a suspension funicular railway (i.e. there are two lines with the carriage ascending being raised by the weight of the carriage descending).

One aspect of the system caught my eye, more on the basis of ‘that would never work in Ireland’. Shortly after leaving the lower station, the line crosses over a road. With no warning signs or gates, the carriage crosses this road at a height that would enable an accident in the form of a large road vehicle running into it.

Were such a system in use in Ireland, I could see it being closed regularly due to vehicular strikes.

Between 1920 and 1943, the County Donegal Railways Joint Committee had an enterprising general manager in the form of Henry Forbes, a man whose initiative probably kept the company in better nick than most narrow gauge railways and especially its northern neighbour, the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway.

One of the things he was known for was actively reusing life expired equipment for different purposes and were he around today, he would undoubtedly be impressed with this activity.

North Carolina, USA, suffered extensive damage during Hurricane Helene in September 2024, including the destruction of road bridges.

I came upon this news article which showcases an innovative use of withdrawn railway carriages (referred to as “railcars” in the article), in forming temporary road bridges, allowing for the quicker restoration of connections than would be the case if localities had to wait for a conventional bridge to be installed.