GSIA - Talk at Gloucestershire Heritage Hub on Tuesday, 25 March 2025 at 7.30pm

[Alexander Gay]

Dear GSIA Members and Friends,

You are warmly invited to the next GSIA in-person talk as noted below:

Date: Tuesday, 25 March 2025 at 7.30pm

Venue: Gloucestershire Heritage Hub (Gloucester Archives)

Title: The Railways of Sharpness

Speaker: Mike Smith (GSIA member)

"Following the opening of the New Dock (1874), it was the Sharpness end of the canal which became the focus for development. Warehouses were built to accommodate the corn cargoes discharged from the big ships, and areas were laid out as timber yards. A network of railways ran round both sides of the dock with a high-level line serving two coal tips built for bunkering the growing number of steamers and for offering an export cargo.  The high-level line was linked to the coal mining area of the Forest of Dean via the multi-span Severn Railway Bridge, which had to have a swinging span over the canal to allow tall vessels to pass." (from The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, Hugh Conway-Jones, 1999).

Mike Smith will tell us about the locomotives and rolling stock that served in the docks, the passenger service, the Severn Railway Bridge, the locomotives that were scrapped at Sharpness in the 1960s, and talk briefly about the Vale of Berkeley Railway. 

It should be an interesting evening.

We hope you will join us.

A further date for your diary 

On Tuesday, 29 April 2025 at 7.30pm, at the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, we have a talk on The Newport Transporter Bridge.  Our speaker is Jeff Grosvenor.