The F&W/ Pathfinder Archive

You will most likely have arrived at this Page via the link on the updates section of the main page of Six Bells Junction. In time however it is more likely you will have arrived by following a link on one of the thousand-plus F&W/Pathfinder railtour pages.

So, how does the Six Bells Junction Website link-in with the F&W/Pathfinder Archive and more fundamentally, what actually is it? This 'project' (as I am calling it) began in late 2025 when I was contacted and offered access to the hard-copy files that F&W/Pathfinder had saved over the 50+ years of operation. I was warned up front that it was not a small collection...! Despite that, was there ever a chance I was going to say no to what promised to be potentially such a rich source of untapped gen....missing locos & stock, missing routes, missing timings, missing tours even?!? Wind forward to May 2026 and I found myself driving down to Gloucester to meet with Peter Watts (for anyone not aware he was the 'W' of F&W Railtours). After some initial chit-chat about life and railways in general Peter led me to the Aladdin's cave (well, actually a summerhouse at the bottom of a garden) where I was confronted with approaching 50 storage boxes of paperwork...

As can be seen, the boxes are all indexed (and largely even stored in numerical/chronological order). Inside each storage box are multiple folders, each one for a specific tour. The paperwork varies but generally includes pre-tour advertising and booking form, tour brochure and timing sheet, organisational notes and communications, and other relevant information to the tour 'as required'. With everything being so well ordered, whilst the volume of paperwork is indeed as vast as you would expect for an organisation that ran over 1,000 railtours during its existence, at least it was in immaculate order which would make the job of ploughing through it very much easier.

'Feel free to take it all away today' I was invited...well, I would I replied...'but I'm only in a Nissan Micra, not a Transit van!' In the event, files 1 to 5 (10/06/1973 to 23/04/1988) are now sat near to where I am sat creating this Page, awaiting my attention (this amounts to some 132 tours-worth of gen). The OCD in me decided I will start at the very first tour, 'The Snowdonian' which ran on 10th June 1973, and work forward. My expectation is that the earlier the tour, the more likely the archive will yield new information for SBJ. My plan is to extract all new information and transfer it to the relevant tour Page. As I 'complete' each tour Page I will add a link to this Page as an indication that it has been 'reviewed' using the &W Tours/Pathfinder Archive. The year index Page will also be updated to include the tour number in square brackets after the F&W or PT organiser initials, a second indication that tour has been 'reviewed' and it will be added to the 'master tabulation'. The tour number is taken directly from a list which Peter gave me which lists 923 tours (the last in the list being 'The Abercot Generator' of 14th January 2012. Beyond that I do not (at time of writing) have a numerical listing of subsequent Pathfinder tours, although I know SBJ has over 1,200 Pages of F&W/Pathfinder trips (note: that's including cancelled ones, which I see aren't listed in the Pathfinder listing).

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