My introduction to the East Kent Light Railway
I first became aware that this line had existed ten years ago, when I read about it in a book on the Kent and East Sussex Railway, another line built and managed by Colonel Stephens, which had loaned it two locomotives for a short period.
I happened to find a book on the EKLR in the Ian Allen bookstore in Birmingham, and to my surprise, found that the EKLR had owned an example of my favourite engine, the 0415 class Adams Radial tank.
Over the next few years I began to buy any book I could find about the EKLR, searching for more about the Adams Radial. To my surprise, I found no photographs at all of the engine anywhere at all except standing idly in the yard near the engine shed. This began to intrigue me, why was it never photographed at work?
That wasn't the only puzzling thing I came across either. There were parts of the East Kent Light Railway which were photographed frequently, but other parts which seemed to be invisible. Wingham Colliery, for instance, never seeemd to have been photographed, or mapped. The farm siding for Moat Farm not only was never photographed, but Moat Farm didn't appear on any maps. There were no photographs of Hammill Brickworks apart from one when it was being built. The mysteries of the East Kent Light Railway began to take hold of me.
Despite buying all the books and magazines I could find, I realised that there were not going to be any answers to the mysteries available from bookshops. My questions were going to remain unanswered, and I would never really know what it had been like to travel upon the line to those un-documented places. And now, of course, most of the line was lost for ever. There was only one short piece of film of an engine running on the line, and I realised that the only way to get a feel for what it would have been like to ride on the EKLR would be to model it within a computer.
This site is about the creation of those models. It is also about the software and data sources needed to undertake a project like this.
- The line from Shepherdswell to Eythorne and the branch to Tilmanstone colliery, which still exists.
- A Main Line from Eythorne to Eastry
- A little-used line from Eythorne to Guilford colliery
- The Main Line from Eastry to Wingham
- The branch from Eastry to Richborough Port
Although earthworks and fencing for other extensions did take place, no track was ever laid other than those lines mentioned above. Modelers might like to speculate what might have happened if the branches to Deal and Canterbury ever opened.
Some remnants of the earthworks for the closed sections of the EKLR may still be found today along the route, at Wingham, Selson Lane, the approach to Richborough Castle sidings, and along the Guilford branch.
Of course, the simulation allows for modeling some of those planned extensions which never came to fruition, and one of my projects is to see what the Walmer extension might have looked like.