ONE of the last great feats of the age of the Victorian navvies will be recreated at Didcot Railway Centre this weekend. While creations of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel like the Clifton ...

The buildings were used for Brunel’s Great Western Railway, a broad-gauge railway which carried its first steam trains in 1838, but were levelled in 1906 to make way for a storage yard.

A contemporary report from the time read: “May 21, 1892, will long be remembered by the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall as the day on which the last vestige of Broad Gauge disappeared from the ...

In just two days, on May 21 and 22 1892, the Great Western Railway converted its last 7ft 0¼in-gauge tracks to the standard 4ft 8½in used by Britain’s other railways.

No matter how much better/quicker/safer the Great Western Railway’s Broad Gauge was perceived to be by those who used it, it was not the system that the rest of the country adopted.