My first encounter with the Gospel Oak to Barking Line was in the late 1960s when with the son of a neighbour we caught the train, a DMU of course, to Barking from Kentish Town. I don't remember much else to be truthful. Over the years its fortunes have waxed and waned, I recall that in the 1980s, when I was living in Forest Gate in East London, there was very little freight traffic over the route owing to weight restrictions on some parts of the line. Today it is enjoying a renaissance thanks to the injection of upgrade funds from Transport for London and Network Rail, although it no longer hosts boat trains from St Pancras to Tilbury as it did in years gone by.

The line's history is quite complicated, what we know today as a single integrated route was in fact two railways. The oldest was the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction which opened in 1868. Originally owned by the Great Eastern (who promoted it) it later fell into the hands of the Midland and, later still, became a joint Midland & GER operation. East of what is now South Tottenham is the route of the Tottenham and Forest Gate which opened in 1894 and was a Midland and London Tilbury & Southend undertaking. Today the 'join' between the two lines at South Tottenham is still quite evident by the track geometry!

Being non-electrified there are a number of decent shots from overbridges and stations, the bridge shots often needing steps foir a decent view. Until 2009 the line boasted a mechanical signal box at Harringay Park and a slew of both motor worked and manual semaphores. Now it's LED colour lights, which control both a busy freight scene and also LOROL's 15 minute interval passenger service with new class 172 Turbostars.