The Forest of Dean is located in that little triangle of land between the Severn and the Wye as they approach their confluence just north of Bristol. It is stuffed with various natural resources (such as coal, wood, iron and limestone) as well as large animals (deer, boar, sheep and suchlike). It has lots of trees and a reasonably large population living in rather industrial-styled houses sat in the middle of nowhere.

By 1900 this world was linked to the rest of the universe by four railways. The Monmouth Tramroad, later the Great Western Railway's Coleford Branch, ran steeply downhill across the four miles from Coleford to Monmouth. The Lydney and Lydbrook Tramway, which rapidly became the Severn and Wye Railway, presented a fiercely independent network linking the towns of Lydney, Coleford, Lydbrook and Cinderford (remaining independent in spirit even after it sold out to the Great Western and Midland railway companies). The Forest of Dean Tramway ran from the port at Bullo, near Newnham, to Cinderford, becoming the Forest of Dean Railway after takeover by the Great Western with an extension out of the northern end of the forest, the last part of which was never opened.

The fourth railway came about as a result of several local businessmen deciding that the tramways from Bullo and Lydney did not serve the centre of the Forest adequately, so they began to build their own line - a project which ran into financial troubles with remarkable speed and soon joined the very long list of railways which were being bailed out by the Great Western (which was hardly flush with cash itself at this point). Linking Awre Junction with New Fancy Colliery via Blakeney, the new railway was completed at the same time as the Severn and Wye Railway was converted from a tramroad into a proper railway and began to gain from the increase in profits. Its decision to build a new mineral loop, creating a lasso around the centre of the forest, had much the same effect as a lasso when it opened in 1872, pulling all traffic from collieries such as New Fancy towards its port and junction in Lydney. Alas, the new railway never stood a chance.

The Severn and Wye Railway stands amongst a very small selection of lines which successfully killed a competitor and the grandly named Forest of Dean Central Railway stands as one of an even smaller selection of routes which obediently laid down and died. Given the Severn and Wye's status as a fairly insignificant local railway compared to the might of the Great Western, it was a remarkable incident.

The following pictures give some idea of the route of the middle Forest railway.

	Looking north-east towards Gloucester, this January 2008 view of Awre Junction signal box and the mainline shows just how much the place has declined - or how little, given that it was never very busy. The station was built for the new line and had platforms on the mainlines with a couple of sidings and loops for shunting branch trains. The branch never carried passenger trains and even at its peak between 1869 and 1872 traffic seems to have run only on alternate days. Most of the sidings were located on the derelict land beyond the signal box with connections to the mainline at each end. The station and the actual divergence of the trackbeds were behind the camera. The junction remained essentially the same throughout the railway's career, carefully laid out with no facing points on the mainline so trains from both directions had to reverse onto the branch (which helped everyone get used to the idea of going backwards, since there was no loop at Blakeney and so from 1921 all trains had to be pushed up the branch). With the closure of both station and branch in August 1959, the site was cleared of all except the essential 1909-built signal box, required to control the level crossing. Yet, like the rail traffic, the signalling requirements soon shifted to Lydney and the box has stood derelict next to the former mainline since the 1970s. Due to the Great Western influence on this area, the South Wales Railway was constructed to the Great Western's very own track gauge of 7'¼". The Forest of Dean Central was also built to this gauge and the main Forest of Dean Railway was converted to it shortly after being acquired by the Great Western. When the Severn and Wye was rebuilt it was also persuaded to lay its track to this gauge. However, standardisation with the rest of the network in the 1870s saw these lines all relaid to the normal 4'8½", leaving a legacy of over-wide infrastructure and excess width between the running lines on double track.
	Blakeney was the terminus of the line for much of its career. Services north of here all ceased in 1921 and the route beyond milepost 2 was regarded as abandoned from 1926. Officially closed in 1932, it was dismantled in 1940, leaving a stub of slightly less than two miles for the occasional freight train. Blakeney was home to the railway's two main engineering features - a pair of short viaducts with the line's characteristic low arches, rather reminiscent of Brunel's viaduct at Maidenhead. None of the underbridges along the route left all that much headroom, averaging at about 12ft, and consequently only one survives intact. This is the more northerly of the Blakeney pair, crossing a local road, the scenic route to Parkend and Coleford, several drives and the local stream. Although the arched sections are intact, the two girder spans over the scenic route and the stream have now been demolished. Blakeney might have survived longer had someone bitten the bullet and provided a passenger service over the stub of the line. A stopping service from Gloucester to Blakeney might not have survived Beeching but would have left the Great Western with something more approaching a legacy for their own line into the Forest. Instead, freight traffic from the well-placed goods yard ceased in 1949 and Blakeney has not seen a train since.
	Getting out into open country, the railway passes through a short cutting and then heads up the valley on a hillside ledge. The valley is obediently straight for about quarter of a mile before it twists left and then sharply right. The railway solves this problem by sweeping across the valley and plunging through the hillside in the centre in a deep cutting. With the closure of the line, the cutting has been filled with rubble and is now impossible to spot at its northern end. At the southern end, however, it can be distinguished as the road passes over a deep ravine which is soon blocked by rubble. The deep cuttings are one of the few things which marks this line out from the other railways in the Dean, which were all built along the routes of earlier tramways and so opted for fairly minimal earthworks, instead utilising steep gradients and sharp bends. This new railway, which does not use a former tramroad as a basis, also opted for steep gradients and sharp bends, but coupled them with impressive earthworks. The Severn and Wye, Forest of Dean Railway and Coleford Branch all opted for tunnels whenever they encountered a hill which they could not easily go around and the Severn and Wye built an impressive viaduct across the valley at Lydbrook. Curiously, the engineer for this railway opted for a style of construction more associated with narrow gauge than broad gauge, and where the railway has to cross the valley a few hundred yards to the north of here it does so on a high embankment.
	Two obstructed cuttings and a Forestry Commission-built car park later, the railway crosses its Blackpool Bridge. The Blackpool Brook, winding down from Mallard's Pike, passes under the railway with a culvert which would put some of the Wye Valley Railway's to shame. The railway then crosses the ancient road from Soudley, which had a station on the Forest of Dean Railway. While it may be regarded as a bit of an obstruction, it does prevent large vehicles from using this road and at least no longer has a gate under it (which, for some reason, it did in the earlier parts of the 20th century). This low-arched structure, built at a height where most companies would have opted for a girder construction, does its best to suggest that the railway that it carried between 1868 and 1921 (about a third of its life to date) is still active. The only thing it lacks is the Railtrack sign warning you that if you hit this bridge the safety of trains may be at stake (a sign which has been affixed to a number of other disused railway bridges) - oh, and an actual railway. North of here the railway ran up a narrow valley with the brook and the road to Parkend. A girder bridge carried it across the road to Parkend with the obligatory minimal clearance, with the result that the bridge is no longer there. The line then wound along the hillside into the Howbeech area, with its quarries, colliery and rather nice stone-lined channel for the Blackpool Brook. At the time of writing (September 2009) this channel was bone dry, although this may be a seasonal thing.
	Howbeech Colliery was the uppermost of a string of industries in a mile-long belt up the Blackpool Brook valley. Water was supplied from the reservoir at Mallard's Pike, just up the valley, so there was a distinct incentive to invest here. The railway provided another incentive and - when finally complete - linked the colliery and quarries to the outside world. Initially this just provided some additional traffic to supplement what little was being produced by New Fancy, but from 1872 the colliery and quarries found themselves as the major source of traffic for the line. The quarries slowly slipped out over the years - most of them had been quarrying back cutting walls, which infers very light traffic since explosions are normally discouraged around active railway lines for fear of hitting trains and so scheduling them tends to be very difficult. The colliery initially featured a shaft below where the photograph was taken from, with the road across the centre running around the outside of the boundary and the railway just beyond that. The rail link to the colliery ran across the road where the people carrier is parked today. A second shaft was sunk behind the brambles and bracken to the right in later years, boosting coal traffic a little. This traffic was dutifully supplied for around 50 years until a miners' strike killed the colliery in 1921, taking the railway north of Blakeney with it. Howbeech Colliery is not as dead as the railway, however; a drift mine has now been dug below the trackbed towards the older workings. A two-foot gauge line allows mine trucks to be worked around the site. Produce is presumably removed by lorry.
	Beyond Howbeech, the line had only the briefest of careers. New Fancy colliery was the only development to benefit from the final mile of track, and then only for four years. Like many cuttings along the route, this one is now waterlogged, overgrown and partially filled in. Abandoned even before the final cycle of railways began to open, trains ran out of this end of the cutting, past Mallard's Pike lake and on through the forest to what had to pass for the terminus. This impressive cutting is typical of those built for the line - long, deep, slashing through an arm of the hill and in a location where the other Dean railways would have gone around the outside or built a tunnel. The line was clearly intended to last and expensive earthworks were constructed accordingly. The Severn and Wye's general policy of doing things on the cheap won out, however, and this route never even came close to repaying its construction costs. A bridge part-way along this cutting has been demolished and replaced by infill, but a rather impressive culvert (5ft 6in high, about 7ft across and with a nice stone floor) remains at the other end, carrying the Blackpool Brook under the railway. Most of the brook's time around Howbeech Colliery is spent underground.
	If one is to turn around from the location from which the picture above was taken and push through a bank of trees, another, drier and more walkable cutting opens up, which carries the line through a hillock adjacent to Mallard's Pike lake and opens out to point across the car park at the trackbed north. Were the line still open, it would now be a minor tourist route - Mallard's Pike is one of the many beauty spots in the Forest (when it isn't raining) with a new "Go Ape!" climbing place and one end of the Forestry Commission's cycle network. Yet this stretch of the line closed in 1878, having never seen a passenger train; the only vehicular access is now by car or bicycle. Unlike many stretches of track around the country, it is hard to envisage a scenario for this line which would ensure that it was still operating today. Mallard's Pike claims that, while both mallards and pike are common in the lake, it is in fact named after Mr. Maller and his turnpike road from Blakeney to Coleford. Turnpikes were good quality roads maintained by charging users a toll for travelling along them and arrived in the 1750s along with the canals and the railways. Initially holding a monopoly on passenger transport, the highly-profitable turnpike network was taken by surprise when the railways realised that they could make some money out of fast passenger trains - and did so. The network was virtually extinct by 1850 although tolls continued to be charged on the Cobb into Porthmadog in North Wales until 2003, when the 10p toll and associated three-mile tailback was abolished. Modern toll roads include several major road bridges and the M6 (Toll) which, despite offering savings of millions of pounds a year by allowing people to dodge the traffic jams in central Birmingham, is used by virtually no-one.
	The gradient on the line rising up from Mallard's Pike imposed one of those little idiosyncrasies of the Forest's rail network - the junction which points in the wrong direction. Trains from Awre arrived on the left-hand path (then a single track railway) and entered the loop/ pair of sidings behind the camera. The train then headed off between the trees along the grassy belt on the right towards New Fancy colliery. Upon their return they simply reversed the process. This method of working naturally introduced a delay and so, when the Severn and Wye came along, their sweet talking and the offer of access to Lydney Docks seem to have persuaded the colliery management to change haulier. The Severn and Wye Mineral Loop crossed the New Fancy branch on the level, which probably caused the Board of Trade some concerns when it came to approving the newer line. These were swiftly allayed by the fact that the branch line did not survive long enough to present a serious danger to coal trains descending down the Severn and Wye from the deeper parts of the Forest.
	Looking north from the same spot, we see the location of the turning sidings. About 300 yards further up the line it crossed one of the many Forest tracks, which is still there today. Barely 50 yards beyond that the Foresty Commission's new road takes a sharp turn to the right, abandoning the trackbed which has brought it from Mallard's Pike. The turn marks the most northerly extent of the intrusion of this Great Western-supported line into the Forest; what extends beyond is a deserted and unused strip of land prepared for rail use but never turned into a railway. The Forest tracks, some of which have names, are mostly run along very old roads which linked mines, houses and general sections of woodland. This one is unusual in being laid on a railway - the Forest of Dean Railway is mostly derelict or footpaths and the Severn and Wye network has almost entirely been converted into cycleway. Although the Forest is mostly open access this does not mean that the tracks are actually public roads, being intended purely as bridleways and a means for Forest staff and those who are lucky enough to live at the end of one to get around. As footpaths go they are very good, offering a solid surface which rarely vanishes into a bramble bush or a bog. As cycleways they tend to be rather sore on the bottom due to the uneven surface made of medium-sized stones. As railways they are entirely useless; taking a train along one tends to rapidly lead to a serious accident.
	In a most unusual move, the Severn and Wye actually co-operated when its new mainline was obliged to cross the authorised, if incomplete, Forest of Dean Central Railway. It built three bridges in one embankment - one over a still-unsurfaced Forest road, one over this railway and one over the Blackpool Brook (which came off worst, with an 8-inch high culvert). Unusual in that it rendered unnecessary the railway that it crossed, this structure provided neither company with any particular benefit and when British Rail lifted the track on the Severn and Wye Mineral Loop in the 1950s it took the bridge span with it. The replacement structure, made entirely of timber resting on the original abutments, was built when the Forestry Commission turned most of the abandoned stretches of the Severn and Wye network into cyclepaths. While the line into Cinderford and the bottom end of the Mineral Loop remain abandoned (the former has too many tracks slashing through the trackbed and the latter passes through a collapsing tunnel), the new transport network has attracted traffic levels far beyond those obtained by the Severn and Wye Railway. This bridge is marked on one of the cycleway leaflets as "Central Bridge". Few, however, will fully realise the insignificance of what lies under this timber girder.
	And so the railway ended. Looking north from the Severn and Wye's overbridge, we see what work took place to extend the railway deeper into the forest before the scheme was abandoned, heading up the valley towards Speech House lake. Strangled by its smaller competitor, the Great Western never ran a revenue earning train under this bridge. This is not the end of the trackbed, although it is beyond the end of the track, so does not constitute the end of the article. As this spot featured one freight-only line crossing another freight-only line, there isn't even the option of returning to civilisation in a railway carriage, which means that you may as well stay on for the last bit. There is a sort of nice feeling about exploring this last stretch of the Forest of Dean Central line because you know that you're seeing as much as anyone ever has seen; nobody was born too late to travel on the "last ever" railtour out here. It is hard to take pictures of the line north of here, as it is mostly overgrown with trees and is rather indistinct anyway. In some respects, this means that it is the most fascinating bit to explore. Other people may wish to stick with the bit south of Mallard's Pike. Whatever your view, the only way to get back to Awre from Central Bridge is - and always has been - to walk. Sorry. It would not be beyond the will of people to re-open this route - it would merely be a question as to whether anyone has the will to do so. Given the fact that the northern terminus would be in the middle of a deep forest well away from population centres, it is likely that the required will is absent. About the only use for it would be if the Dean Forest Railway's expansionists decided to set up a new line linking Blakeney with Mallard's Pike and Speech House Lake. This would be hard put to be as unsuccessful as the original line, although running trains over a stretch of previously-unused trackbed probably doesn't quite constitute preservation. Awre Junction station is almost certainly gone for good and the trackbed south of Blakeney goods station has a housing estate on it.
	The Forest's railways crop up occasionally in various television programmes, but the Forest of Dean Central probably scored highest with an appearance in "The Gates of Avalon" - the seventh episode of the first series of BBC One's show Merlin. You wouldn't have noticed it, although much of the filming took place on the proposed route of the trackbed, which ran through the current site of Speech House Lake. The visible line ends uninspiringly in a birch wood below the dam at the bottom end. For the last mile the trackbed consists of a flattened surface running through the trees (rather literally, as a lot of them grow on it), visible only if you really know what you're looking for, as seen in the picture above. Its last level crossing, next to a small structure called "Reform Bridge" which carries a Forest track over Blackpool Brook, is followed by a steadily widening flattened surface with the brook to the left of ascending trains (not that there were any) and a small bank to the right. This then crosses over a very small culvert; the next stream north is obliged to cross the trackbed on the level, and a few yards beyond that the level surface apruptly ends in a two-foot-high bank. The slightly higher land beyond has a more crumpled, natural feel to it for another couple of dozen yards before it rises into the dam of Speech House Lake (which is too high for the railway to have climbed over and so probably post-dates the proposed route). A few traces exist north of the lake, heading up towards Foxes Bridge Colliery, although they have disappeared by the Speech House Road and Foxes Bridge was denied the opportunity to be served by all three of the Forest's major rail networks. Instead, only the Severn and Wye and the Forest of Dean lines were connected to that particular hole in the ground.
	Foxes Bridge Colliery had a beginning not unlike the Forest of Dean Central - it went to a great deal of expense and still didn't get what it wanted. Initial diggings at a site convenient for the Speech House ended up producing only water, which is available in vast quantities all over the Forest at no immediate expense to anyone and so was of no use to the colliery owners. The colliery therefore decided to solve the problem by upping sticks and moving lock, stock and barrel to Crabtree Hill, three-quarters of a mile to the north of Speech House. Here they were able to benefit from the much closer proximity of the Severn and Wye Mineral Loop and the Forest of Dean Branch, both of which provided spurs to the colliery. The Forest of Dean Central, meanwhile, found that it had ended up in the paradox of the runner and the tortoise - it was racing up the Forest towards the colliery, which in turn was slowly moving away from the proposed northern terminus - and decided that it couldn't afford the extension north of New Fancy. It might have completed its trackbed later, but events overtook it and the runner had to retire to Blakeney. Meanwhile the tortoise went the way of most of the Forest's collieries and its only claim to fame now is that it marks the highest point on the Forestry Commission's cycle network, which deviates off the Mineral Loop specially. A large expanse of bog marks the top of Blackpool Brook, the northern end of the line and the original colliery site. If you're lucky, you may be able to get back to Awre from here without having to walk the entire 6¾ mile route again.