Alderney Assortment

Alderney’s railway owes its origins to Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington. His concerns about France’s expansion of the port of Cherbourg resulted in two large harbours being built in the Channel Islands. One was on Jersey and the other on Alderney, near Braye. Work on the Alderney harbour started in 1847, and a railway was laid to the nearby quarry to bring stone to the coast. Newly crowned French Emperor Napoleon III presented a further threat, and 12 forts were built around the island, including Fort Grosnez, at the base of the breakwater. Railway tracks run round the base of the Victorian fort. The Admiralty operated the line until the start of the First World War. The Mannez Quarrying Company used it during the inter-war years, up to the Nazi invasion in 1940. The Germans re-laid the railway to metre gauge, to bring it in line with railways that they’d built on Jersey and Guernsey. Standard gauge metals were laid again during the late 1940s/early 1950s and the railway became part of the Royal Navy Works Department. It passed through various hands until the late 1970s when the States of Alderney suggested that a Sundays-only tourist service should be introduced when the quarry wasn’t operating. Two years later the line was leased, with the first tourist train running in 1980.