Country Railway Routes: Alnmouth to Alnwick, Coldstream and Berwick

By Roger Darsley and Dennis Lovett (hardback, Middleton Press, 96pp, £18.95, ISBN 978-1-910356-59-3). HERE is a companion volume to the Alnmouth to Berwick book by the same authors, reviewed in our last issue. The big difference is that as opposed to a section of the East Coast Main Line, here is a very winding route through a remote rural area which lost its passenger services in the Thirties and its freight two decades later.

The main heritage interest here is that part of the Alnwick branch is being slowly rebuilt as the Aln Valley Railway, which is discussed in detail with a plethora of archive black-and-white photographs of locomotives like D40s, J39s and K1s in action during the steam era alongside the modern-day Alnwick Lionheart operation. And wasn't Alnwick's covered station, which opened on September 5, 1887, truly magnificent?

We learn about one railway that came before the rest here, in the form of the Shilbottle Colliery Railway, a waggonway which ran from 1809 until the 1840s.

LOCAL RAIL HISTORY AT ITS FINEST