Tyne and Wear Metro operator Nexus has donated surplus materials from its renewal project at Whitley Bay Metro station to support the restoration effort led by volunteers working to revive the Woodhorn Narrow Gauge Railway in Ashington.

This comes as hopes of reopening the heritage line later this year grow, following years of closure and deterioration.

The donation includes 50 tonnes of concrete ballast blocks, 200 scaffolding boards, 40 timber posts, and 54 sheets of plywood. Volunteers plan to use the ballast blocks to construct a retaining wall and create a new ballast store.

Many of the materials would otherwise have been sent to landfill, reflecting Nexus’ wider focus on sustainability and social value.

The donation follows an annual volunteer day in which members of the operator’s track maintenance team helped install track at the railway.

Renewal work at Whitley Bay station was carried out for Nexus by Gateshead-based G&B Civil Engineering.

The Woodhorn Narrow Gauge Railway first opened in the 1990s after track, three carriages and a training engine from Vane Tempest Colliery in County Durham were donated in 1991. The line later acquired two further locomotives, including one used during the construction of the Channel Tunnel.

The railway closed in 2018 because of a shortage of volunteers. Its one-kilometre track runs between Woodhorn Museum and Queen Elizabeth II Country Park.

 “This donation is important as we are a voluntary group who are restoring a railway without any official funding. 

“We are grateful to Nexus for their support. We rely on donations like this to make progress. The concrete blocks will be particularly useful. This will save us time and money. We started the project in 2023 as a wellbeing group, looking to restore the engines, but it snowballed from there and we decided to take on the challenge of bringing the entire railway back into use. 

“We’ve restored three quarters of the line and the infrastructure that goes with it. There’s about 400 metres of line left to go, and we are aiming to be open by the end of October this year. Nexus has also given us great support through their employee volunteer days, where some of the Metro workers gave up their time to lay some of the track and ballast. That’s how the link up came about. 

“They had a lot of spare building materials from their project at Whitley Bay, and we were more than happy to take it and put it to good use.”

Colin Heath, Volunteer Co-ordinator at the Woodhorn Narrow Gauge Railway.