Cab Ride - Hastings to Tonbridge 

Thanks for the Videos Your Journeys give me a real insight to areas that I would normally never see Particularly when you have access to the sidings and movements that normally are never mentioned Thanks much appreciated.

I don’t know why but it’s so mesmerising to watch your journey from a different angle!🤷🏻‍♀️😅🤓

Thank you for a great cab-ride video on one of my favourite routes

Great to see that you filmed on from Hastings, fantastic viewing.

Another interesting video today. Always enjoy them! Cheers mates! 🇬🇧🙂👍🇺🇸

Great video emmo, another lovely journey, beautiful scenery, amazing railway infrastructure, tunnels, cuttings etc👌, love the imfomation captions 👌, keep up the good work 👌😀👍

Great video. One of my favorite parts of England! Thank you.

That St Leonards station is amazing. What a lovely setting.

Wonderful view. I travelled this trip many times.

It was not that the line was built on the cheap, but that the contractors, Fox, Henderson & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, cut corners by only putting in four courses of bricks instead of the six specified by the line's engineer, Robert Stephenson. This became apparent when the tunnels started collapsing, and the additional two courses had to be added inside the tunnels, thus narrowing them.

Another very enjoyable video, thank you.

Very interesting thank you! You may have been annoyed at the slow running with your machine…but as I don’t know this line very well it was interesting to see the Infrastructure closeup and in detail together with the topography either side of the route. I knew the history of the tunnels and they’re obviously as bad as described in the railway histories! As I used to work at Woking ECR it was also especially interesting to see how different the modern substations are on this route ( complete with the criminal daubing carried out with aerosol spray cans).It was always a unique line and retains its special status. Many thanks again, Rob in Bournemouth.

Really enjoy your videos, good routes, the noise of the tamper and the information captions make it really interesting, I never knew that about the narrow tunnels. 👍

I am a train 🚆and I approve this video!!

Love these

Surprisingly quiet (apart from the rattles) for a work vehicle. Great quality pictures and of places and at speeds not normally seen. Pity you are not based country wide. Great work, thanks for sharing.

Spent many a happy trip travelling from Luton down to St Leonards Warrior Square to visit my grandparents in the 70s and 80s...the old Thumpers, can still recall the smell of them...the hand written wooden boards that would be changed to announce the next train...and having to change at Tonbridge on occasion and having a very plain cheese sandwich from the Journey's End shop...or was it Journey's Friend?

I ve been on this line often but never seen it from this aspect .Amazing how they built cuttings and tunnels in those days with pick and shovel and the amount of bricks used!! 🤔

Lovely line, but some steep gradients too. Thanks for posting

I was looking for a video of this section. Hastings Diesels have lots of other videos but not the bit on home territory. I found a very old video from just after the line was electrified and the track in tunnels was singled, but it's poor quality because of analogue camcorder quality in those days. Yours is much better!

I'd guess that the tour of the Kent Coast was to orient the unit in the right direction (Ashford and Tonbridge are directly connected but you'd be going backwards).

Thank you, photography really brought scenery to light. To maintain interests, may I suggest that you the odd road bridge, it gives an idea of the speed, and to some an idea where one is. Thank you, caption are very good. Patrick, Northamptonshire

Well How weird is that, I was on that 171 that went past at the start of the video as I got off at Hastings from a 375 on P3, and I did see this tamper go past on my 171 haha

Nice video. I can see my car in the carpark at Etchingham 🤣

2:01 great thash in that tunnel

High Brooms: at one time famous for a fares anomaly whereby the cost of a season ticket from London to there was less than from London to Tonbridge, so there was all of a sudden a suspicious rise in the number of tickets being sold to there vice Tonbridge ... 🤔

Another great video. I noticed in this and the previous video that the headlights inside the tunnels are not as bright as normal. Was it just a case of switching them fully on?

At 55:39 sounded like the driver turned the air conditioning off [what sounded like a fan cuts out]

Do you think they will ever consider making some/all of those tunnels double tracked by making them wider? I don't know your part of the world, but wondering if demand is great enough for it.

could we maybe get some more SE lines from gravesend?dartford?cannon strreet or even charing cross?!?!?!?!?!

At the end of Bo Peep Tunnel and Junction how did you see the signal?? I noticed that you could see the reflection on the glass - Is that how you saw it and was it different in real life to what the camera sees...

What company owner the Plasser 09 type tamper ? Thanks

Any idea what work they are doing at 30:34 ?

We don’t have semaphore signals here anymore

How comes you've come from ashford, through Hastings, to get to tonbridge. Is there not a way of getting there around paddock wood?

Colas Rail ?

When was this?

It's not an area I think of as particularly hilly but there's plenty tunnels on this stretch. I wonder if the crooked contractors realised that their shoddy work would still be causing grief over 150 years later. The few thousands they were fined may well have been a lot of money in those days but what has been spent to date repairing their deceit? Think of the stock built to special loading gauge, repairs and arrangements following collapses, preventative repairs, resignalling all the singled sections, the months of single-line working, skewing/relaying of track - the list, and the cost, is HUGE. Multiple millions of £s and probably many thousands of man-hours over the years, and all to save two courses of brick worth a few pounds. On the positive side though, without the sketchy builders, we wouldn't have Hastings DEMUs on the main line, or the odd-looking Slim Jims and P-Way crews, of several generations, got a few Sundays' overtime.👍😁 Thanks for another interesting journey from the best seat in the house. Cheers for now, Dougie.

How fast can these locomotives travel?