Model Railway Forum

When and why were railways created? What were the circumstances which brought about their existence? History does not make it easy to take out one example from a steady continuum of change. ... There have been tracks or plateways since Roman times. You might say that these could be brought within th...

The Llanfyllin Branch and Oswestry to Llanymynech – Part 1 … The Llanfyllin Branch was featured in an article by Stanley Jenkins in the October 2003 issue of Steam Days magazine. [3] The immediately adjacent Tanat Valley Light Railway is covered articles elsewhere. They can be found on the links in...

Henry Robinson Palmer and Early British Monorails Henry Robinson Palmer (1793-1844) was a British engineer who designed the first monorail system and also invented corrugated iron! Born in 1793 in Hackney, he was the son of the Revd Samuel Palmer, a nonconformist minister, and his wife, Elizabeth, ...

I came across this when looking into early railways. ... Ivan Kirillovich Elmanov (Russian: Иван Кириллович Эльманов) was a Russian inventor. During 1820, in Myachkovo, near Moscow, he built a type of monorail described as a road on pillars. [3] The single rail was made of timber baulks resting abov...

Stockport Corporation Tramways – Part 2 (Modern Tramway Vol. 12 No. 138, June 1949) This is a second article looking at Stockport Corporations Tramways. Mersey Square was the main hub of Stockport’s tramway network and appeared as a schematic plan in Gentry’s article in The Modern Tramway. … http:/...

The first Hungarian ‘railway line’ was completed nearly 20 years before the first steam-powered railway in Hungary (which was opened in 1846) on 15th August 1827, and ran from Pest to Kőbánya. It was one of the early horse-drawn ‘railways’ but was definitely atypical in form!! That railway “ran on a...

The Micklehurst Loop – an update at the beginning of 2025 I am indebted to ‘David’ for an update on the Plevin owned railway land in Mossley. … It is a few years since I wrote a series of articles about the Micklehurst Loop which can be found on this blog. Circumstances have since changed at what w...

The Giants’ Causeway and Portrush Tramway – The Modern Tramway, Vol. 13 No. 153 In the Summer of 2024, my wife and I visited Giants’ Causeway as part of a few days meandering along the North coast of Ireland. When reading a series of older copies of the Modern Tramway, I came across an article writ...

Khartoum, Sudan Again – The Modern Tramway, Vol. 13 No. 156 – December 1950. The Modern Tramway reported in December 1950 on the purchase by the Sudan Light & Power Company of the new 4-motor bogie tramcars. The bogies and equipment were being “supplied by the English Electric Company and the u...

Stockport Corporation Tramways – Modern Tramway Vol. 12 No. 138, June 1949 – Part 1 P.W. Gentry wrote about Stockport's trams in the July 1949 issue of Modern Tramway. He says: "Besides possessing several interesting features of its own, the Stockport system today commands added attention as t...