Full steam ahead Volunteer-run railway submits plans to bring back axed train route

Andy Lowe has been at the Great Central Railway since volunteers took over the closed line in 1969. "That was the year I left school. So as a teenager, I got involved at the beginning.

- Henry Dyer

There was not a great deal here," he said. "No locomotives or carriages, just derelict buildings." It took another four years before the first train ran on the heritage line.

But more than 50 years later, work is underway to reunify two parts of the last Victorian mainline railway to be built, split by the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

Planning permission is being sought and funds are being raised to draw up engineering plans to reconnect the Loughborough to Leicester line with another section running north to Nottingham.

At Loughborough Central station, Lowe is giving a tour of the locomotive shed which sits on the line that will, if plans go ahead, run once again to Robin Hood country.