In the deep mid winter: Foremarke Hall gets its heavy train under way in the fading and chilly winter light at Gotherington on 29th December 2008 with the last service of the Christmas Cracker to Toddington. Photo courtesy Bob Green/STEAM RAILWAY  


Rite of spring: Foremarke Hall accelerating through Dixton Cutting with a service train for Toddington on 15th March 2009. The air is still chilly enough for the steam to condense into a snow-white stream from the chimney, the sun casting a perfect shadow on the cutting side. Photo courtesy Andrew Bell  

The current issue of Steam Railway magazine has plenty of GWR within its pages - and you can get your copy from the station shop at Toddington.  You'll find with its pages a moody picture by Bob Green of no. 7903 Foremarke Hall blasting out of Gotherington station during the Christmas Cracker gala in December 2008.  The picture isn't very big in the magazine so we've reproduced it here for you in all its moody splendour - click on the image for a large version.  The misty conditions and the last rays of the sun make for a surreal image: you can almost feel the cold and hear the blast echoing off the hills as Foremarke Hall gets to grips with the rails with the equivalent of a 10-coach train - as the 'dead' weight of 9F 2-10-0 no. 92203 Black Prince was coupled at the other end of the train.*

Just three months later, after the coldest and snowiest winter in the Cotswolds for many a year, comes the blue skies and promise of spring.  Again, Foremarke Hall is captured with a Toddington-bound train, this time in the sylvan setting of Dixton cutting, about half-a-mile from Gotherington, in an image by Andrew Bell very reminiscent of the 1950s. Swindon-built Foremarke Hall celebrates its 60th birthday this year - although designed by the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Western Railway, F W Hawksworth, as an improvement to Collett's Hall class, no. 7903 was completed by British Railways and was among the last of the class to be completed.

* The GWR was 'topping and tailing' trains during December because a landslip at Cheltenham prevented access to Cheltenham Racecourse station. Unfortunately, the run-round facility at Gotherington wasn't quite finished although it is expected to be fully operational later this year.