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Happy 60th Birthday To Sussex's Historic Bluebell Railway!

Souvenir Bluebell Railway 60th Anniversary Tickets (Photo: The Bluebell Railway)

The Bluebell Railway has produced a limited edition souvenir ticket to mark its 60th birthday.

According to officials helping to run the 11-mile-long heritage line, 2,000 individually numbered cardboard tickets have been made on its special, authentic printing press at its Sheffield Park headquarters.

The tickets have been produced by the railway's museum team to mark 60 years of operation from when the line was reopened by volunteers in August 1960.

At the time, it became the first preserved standard gauge steam-operated passenger railway in the world to operate a public service.

Railway chiefs say the souvenirs are now on sale in the railway's online shop for £5 with all the proceeds going to its emergency appeal to fund the costs of reopening.

They come in a special plastic folder with a letter of authenticity from the Bluebell Railway museum's curator.

The cardboard tickets are known as Edmondson tickets after Thomas Edmondson who invented the printing system which was in use on Britain's railways from 1842 to 1990.

The Bluebell Railway uses a 1941 printing press to produce the Edmondson tickets for use on its services and many other heritage railways.

The tickets can be bought from the railway's shop at https://www.bluebell-railway.com/product/60th-anniversary-platform-ticket/

The Bluebell Railway is planning on reopening on Friday 7 August after being closed since March due to the global pandemic.

Its emergency appeal for funding has raised more than £350,000 so far and is still accepting donations because of the continued uncertainty over coronavirus.

The first public trains on the reopened Bluebell Railway operating as a heritage line were on 7 August 1960, slightly less than two-and-a-half years after its closure in 1958 as a result of a decision taken by the British Railways Branch Line Committee three years previously.

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