Remembering record speeds from London to Bournemouth

Greg Morse marks the anniversary of a record run between Waterloo and the Dorset resort in July 1985.

Bit of a curate’s egg, 1985. If you were an enthusiast living in Bristol, Taunton, Devon or Cornwall, you might have been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Great Western Railway.

If you lived in Swindon you might not, as the closure of the works that built most of the GWR had been announced on May 15.

In Scotland, you might have been following the trials of the new Radio Electronic Token Block equipment on the Kyle line.

Elsewhere, you might be chasing the new(ish) Class 58s, or perhaps planning a trip to see the four Class 40s earmarked for the Crewe remodelling scheme.

But what if you lived on the Southern?

By the mid-1980s, the glory days of the Bulleid Pacifics would have been a dim and distant memory. You would have no memory at all of those events if you’d been born in the early 1970s, or after.

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