Severn Valley Railway’s head of infrastructure Chris Bond has written for the latest issue of SVR’s newsletter, Branch Lines, explaining how building relationships with external rail providers is proving valuable.

Bond reported on a recent week-long visit to SVR by a modern 09 tamper (Plasser & Theurer Unimat 09-4×4/4S Dynamic Tamper 99 70 9123 012-5 (DR 75012)).

The tamper’s owner, SB Rail, benefited from the use of SVR’s track to train its operators, while SVR benefited from being able to use the tamper to improve its track. The heritage railway would not have been able to afford commercial hire of such an advanced dynamic tamper, which would have cost more than ten thousand pounds.

The tamper, which has a ‘caterpillar’ action which enables it to work quickly, carried out urgent tamping work, in particularly in the Alveley Woods area. Ballast dropped in previous months provided the bulk for the machine to make the corrections needed.

Severn Valley Railway is hoping that SB Rail will continue to use it as a base for its training, especially as this first visit went so well that the training period has been extended for another week.

Last night (Wednesday 11 October), a Harsco stone-blowing unit DR80207 arrived at SVR, to be prepared for a year-long training stint. The SVR operations team worked with Rail Adventure and the owner of Class 20 locomotives to transport the unit from Northampton. Bond describes this as “a real coming-together of industry partnerships, from which our Railway can only benefit.”

SVR also continues its partnership working with Network Rail, including running a special charter train in September, which proved useful for cementing relationships.