"Whistle Up" at the Middleton Railway, 1st January 2025

Happy New Year everybody! To start off 2025, I went Middleton for the grand whistle off, where, as tradition, Sir Berkeley was hauling the new year's services - despite the crew getting rather wet! After filming a few trains, I rushed off to Keighley for the night train; that'll be up soon too! Filming spots: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?... My band:   / indignationmeeting   My music channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0tl... My flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/1929153... Engines featured: Sir Berkeley (Manning Wardle L Class) The Middleton Railway was founded in 1758 to carry coal from Middleton Colliery to Leeds City Centre, the first railway to be founded by an act of parliament. In 1812, the world's first commercially successful steam locomotive, The Salamanca, first ran on the Middleton Railway. As well as being the first steam engine to have two cylinders, it made use of a rack and pinion system to increase its tractive effort. In 1960, the NCB had abandoned the section of Middleton track between Moor Road and the colliery, and Leeds Uni's railway club took notice of this. Seeing the opportunity, they ran the first ever standard gauge train on a preserved railway, being a tramcar hauled by the prototype Hunslet diesel 'John Alcock'. They continued running trains over the line, these being industrial trains for the factories along the line. In 1969, they started a passenger service too, and moved to their current operational base at Moor Road in 1983. Now, they run every weekend from April to October, with diesels on Saturdays and steam on Sundays.