The Southern Way Special No. 22

Some 60 years ago, on Thursday 1 September 1966, the very first tube carriage to arrive on the Isle of Wight crossed the Solent on the car ferry from Portsmouth and was driven ashore at Fishbourne on the back of a Pickford’s lorry. At the time the arrival Standard Stock car No. S38S, and the others that would follow over the coming months, might have seemed like a temporary stopgap; a short-term solution until British Rail could justify the closure of the Island’s one remaining railway line. In the event it would herald the dawn of a new age for the Ryde-Shanklin line – one that continues to this day, as an electrified railway operated by ex-London Underground trains. As the photos in this book illustrate – many of them rare or previously unpublished – much has changed in the six decades since car no. S38S arrived at Fishbourne. The Standard Stock is now but a distant memory and the 1938 Stock too has come and gone. Double-track sections have been singled; several signal boxes demolished; platforms have been taken out of use (and, in the case of one station, brought back into use again); service frequencies reduced. 2-car trains now operate where 7-car trains once ran. New stations have been built. Privatisation has come and gone; brand names and liveries have changed. Yet for all that has changed, much has remained the same. 60 years after the Beeching proposals threatened to close almost all of the Isle of Wight’s remaining railways, second-hand London Underground trains still trundle up and down the 8½ miles of electrified track between Ryde Pier Head and Shanklin. With upgraded infrastructure and another ‘new’ fleet of old trains this most unlikely outpost of the national rail network looks set to endure for many more years to come.