Nice story

From The Guardian (here):

It has no buffet car, the waiting room is a garden shed and only one of its three hand-built carriages is fully glazed. But for one week only, the train from Leadhills to Glengonnar Halt has become an essential addition to the UK’s rail network.

In a rare, perhaps unique, moment in British railway history, a replacement train service has been put on to make up for a closed road. It is normally the other way round. And this service is run by amateurs.

Launched 30 years ago by a small group of single-minded rail enthusiasts high on the barren, rocky moors of south-west Scotland, the Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway (L&WR) is ordinarily a weekends-only summertime attraction for tourists.

Then South Lanarkshire council decided to resurface the only road connecting the two villages that vie for the title as Scotland’s highest.

...

So for five days this week, while road builders re-laid and repainted the B797, the L&WR has run a full weekday timetable for the first time in its history. With ticket prices cut from £4 to £1, it has put on 18 services a day between its two stations, with seven trains timed carefully to meet buses in Leadhills running north east to and from Lanark, and its scheduled rail connections to Glasgow.

...

Its workhorse locomotive, a stubby, blue-painted diesel-powered engine called Clyde, rattles and judders over the single narrow-gauge track at a stately five miles an hour; it hits 8mph on its downhill run back to Leadhills.

There is still goodness in this world.