Forty Eight Hours

It’s the Bluebell Railway – a labour of love built over years by a careful crew of railway enthusiasts.

The Bluebell is the living testament to a long local battle and hours of hard work. It’s now run entirely by volunteers, but began life in the late 1870s as part of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway.

In 1955 British Railways tried to close the line – but they had reckoned without local resident, Miss R.E.M.Bessemer, who tripped up the Transport Commission by unearthing an Act of Parliament that required the line owners to run at least four trains a day.

Her challenge led to a reprieve, but just a temporary one. Parliament finally agreed to abolish the Act and so the line was closed in 1958. Yet in 1959 the Lewes & East Grinstead Railway Preservation Society moved in to take over the line and in the summer of 1960 the Bluebell Railway ran for the first time as a steam "museum" railway.

Nowadays the railway runs special events and regular tours through the year; events like a Valentine's Day Pullman Tea, Branch Line Weekend and Mothers' Day Cream Tea are coming up in the next few weeks.

And in its forty six years the Bluebell has become a significant tourist attraction in Mid Sussex. It sees its objectives as the ‘preservation for posterity of a country branch line, its steam locomotives, coaches and goods stock, signalling systems, stations and operating practices’.

Which seems like an appropriate reflection of what Miss Bessemer said of her own fight, all those years ago. We oughtn't," she is reported to have said, "to look at it as a wee strip of line, but as part of a whole principle." 

_{You can see other preserved railways in Sussex. The Lavender Line, part of the former Lewes to Uckfield runs from Isfield station and the Kent and East Sussex Railway runs from Tenterden through the Rother Valley, to Bodia}m.