The Railway Heritage Trust has added two documents to the “Guidance” section of their website which could be of interest to Community Rail Network members. Both of the documents are from Network Rail’s new suite of design guidance documents. The first one is the Redundant Signal Box Strategy, which looks at ways to re-use signal boxes which are no longer in operational use. It includes details of various arrangements for allowing community groups/projects to take on such signal boxes. This is an area of opportunity as greater numbers of signal boxes become redundant as Network Rail concentrates its signalling systems in fewer, larger, operations centres. We know that there is a lot of interest from community groups and our members in reusing signal boxes.

The second document is Heritage: Care and Development, which looks at managing heritage elements of railway stations. This will be of interest especially to station groups involved in projects to preserve/repair such elements as part of their work.