16th June 1992

(1)Fulfilling long-held an ambition, I finally got to Redmire in 1992. These following images (a sequence of 18) were all taken on that visit. The Redmire branch was one of the longest freight only branches then in existence in the UK, at 22 miles. It supported a daily train of limestone to the steelworks at Redcar, at that time a thriving industry in the North East. But the branch was under threat of closure and so I was determined to witness the last trains.

This is the view of the loader, where basically trucks arrived from the nearby quarries, backed into the loader and tipped the stone directly into the the wagon below. Ingeniously simple, but you had to be a confident and careful truck driver!