All aboard for talk

Peterborough Civic Society will welcome Brian White on February 11 who will be speaking on The Travelling Post Office and 40 Years of Nene Valley Railway.

Brian, the curator of the NVR museum and a former GPO employee, is a long serving volunteer and therefore very well qualified to relate the story of the NVR’s trials and triumphs and to outline its exciting plans for the future.

It’s a strange fact that the first railway line to reach Peterborough, in 1845, was not our splendid main line, but the branch of the London and Birmingham Railway that ran in from Blisworth Junction near Northampton.

The line prospered and later gained another arm from Rugby, but by the throw-away 1960s and despite the impending designation of Peterborough for new town expansion, the powers that be saw it as an irrelevant relic to be tossed into the rubbish bin of railway history.

That it survived as far as Wansford and then emerged into its new guise as the Nene Valley Railway was the result of the foresight shown by the Peterborough Development Corporation and the commitment of the band of dedicated volunteers who restored, managed and operated the line.

As well as exhibiting its resident and visiting gems of rolling stock, the NVR also possesses lineside gems in the form of buildings and structures dating from the Victorian era. Most recently, it has purchased for restoration the original station at Wansford, built for the opening of the line and therefore one of the oldest station buildings still surviving anywhere in the country.

The meeting commences at 7.30pm and takes place at St Marks Church Hall, Lincoln Road, Peterborough.

Entrance is free to members, and non-members are requested to make a minimum £3.00 donation to the Society unless they become members while at the meeting.