Remember what it was like taking a Class 117 DMU out of Paddington? Well, this summer you can recreate the experience on the Dorset coast, where one of Pressed Steel’s finest will be on hand at Wareham to run you down to the sea along the heritage railway at Swanage. But the interconnection with South Western Railway’s services on theWeymouth main line is at risk for 2024 and beyond, unless more secure funding arrangements can be put in place.
But before coming to that, first, as the late, great former Modern Railways contributor Brian Perren was wont to say, a little history. The last passenger trains ran and the Purbeck branch line to Swanage closed on 1 January 1972; the southern part of the line eventually became the Swanage Railway heritage operation.
The north end of the branch, from Worgret Junction on the main line to Furzebrook, was retained by British Rail for freight traffic, at first for the ball clay extracted locally and dispatched for pottery manufacture, and later for petroleum products from the Wytch Farm oilfield. The ball clay went to road and the oil to a pipeline: freight traffic ceased in 2005. At the time, Network Rail was in the process of resignalling the Dorset coast line an…
