Bluebell Railway

The Bluebell Railway in Sussex was one of the United Kingdom’s first heritage railways. It operates on a section of the Lewes & East Grinstead Railway, part of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, which opened in 1882. It was closed in 1958 and re-opened as a heritage railway in 1960. For many years it worked trains between Sheffield Park and Horsted Keynes, but in 2013 after the removal of landfill waste from a cutting at Kingscote, it began to run into a station at East Grinstead situated less than 100 m from the station on the national network. The railway has about 30 steam locomotives, many of them representing classes that once worked on lines in Sussex. Some are loaned by private owners and trusts. The railway has a new building at Sheffield Park that provides weatherproof cover for up to 17 locomotives, and also includes an interpretation area and facilities for locomotive crews. The railway’s ambitions for the future include the building of Accessible Steam Heritage (ASH), an interpretive area devoted to the steam locomotive, and the completion of a replica of one of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway’s ‘Atlantic’ locomotives of 1911-12, designed by Douglas Earle Marsh (1862-1933), which once powered the heaviest trains between London and Brighton and the boat trains that ran to Newhaven to connect with the ferries to Dieppe.