I’d previously associated Lydney with Panic Room’s first ever gig, more than three years ago. The Forest of Dean Railway wasn’t running that day, but after seeing Mostly Autumn pay their annual visit to Gloucester on the Saturday night, I decided to make a weekend of it and visit the railway on the Sunday. I it was that I ended up travelling behind a GWR pannier on the line as winds its way through the forest from Lydney to Parkend.

The Dean Forest Railway isn’t just kettles, and like many preserved lines has a significant diesel fleet. As well as quite a number of main-line locos, including a couple of diesel-electrics, they’ve got some nicely-restored shunters, including this beast.

While their service trains consisted of repainted BR Mk1s, with interiors unchanged since the days of Network South-East, they did have this beautifully-restored Hawksworth auto-trailer in BR maroon.

A lack of coordinated timetabling meant a two-hour wait for a connection at Lydney. There’s pretty much nothing near Lydney station, so photographing passing trains is pretty much all you can do. This is an example of the mundane which railway photographers all-too frequently ignore, a class 143 railbus on a Cardiff-bound local.

More interesting from an enthusiast point of view is this Freightliner 66 on a ballast train, possibly connected with the same Sunday engineering work that saw many diverted trains passing through Lydney, making it far busier than on a normal weekday.