The most impressive track renewal of all time?

Having inherited a sizeable mileage of standard-gauge track through amalgamations, and with commercial demands requiring an increasing rate of mixed-gauge track to be laid, the end was in sight for Brunel’s broad-gauge railway. In the mid-1860s, the Great Western Railway began the process of converting its system into a nationally compatible one.

In Wales, the last train operating over broad gauge ran in 1872, and with hundreds of miles of branch lines having been converted by the 1880s, the only significant remaining broad-gauge track was on the Great Western Main Line itself, between London and Penzance (177 route miles to be precise - and nearly three times that many track miles).

Successive conversions over the preceding decades had allowed the GWR to accumulate a great deal of experience, allowing preparations to a high level of detail and accuracy both in offices and on the ground.

Through the first months of 1892, teams of permanent way engineers prepared the railway corridor for an unbelievably ambitious renewal: the entire remaining length of the Great Western would be converted into standard gauge over a single May weekend.

At the crack of dawn on Saturday May 21, nearly 5,000 platelayers, gangers and supervisors set to work - not only changing the distance between the rails, but also ripping out Brunel’s original longitudinal timbers and replacing them with the more effective (and by that point commonplace) transverse sleepers that we still see today.

In what might be the most incredible infrastructure renewal activity in history, this oil and sweat-soaked legion successfully replaced well over 500 miles of track in time for the passage of the Sunday night mail train from Paddington to Plymouth.

Now there’s something for Network Rail’s High Output renewals team to aim for in the next funding period!