I recently visited Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on a short business trip.  Living in Cyprus with no railways at all, I just had to make the time to explore Kuala Lumpur’s Light Rail Transit systems.  Bear in mind as a dedicated gricer, the previous time I’d pointed a camera at a railway subject was in October 2010. Withdrawal symptoms?  You bet!

During my visit, I managed to check out three of the systems:  the Monorail, the rapidKL Ampang Line and Electric Train Service.

Back in 1986 a business trip to Milan unusually featured a few hours of free time here and there - which was my first (and so far only) opportunity for a quick bit of gricing Italian style.  The stuff I saw was a great mix of vintage and modern - scanning the original sides certainly makes me want to go back for a deeper investigation.

The CFD X2000 series were the first ‘modern’ railcars when they were delivered to Corsica in 1975.  Whilst in many ways they were progress, in others they weren’t.

Big, heavy machines with a deep throaty exhaust, the Renault ABH8 railcars or 'autorails' of Corsica were a delight.  These weren’t some lightweight railcars; the ABH8 were scaled down only slightly from the standard gauge Renault VH autorail – and it showed.

Another trip down memory lane, this time to the Chemins de Fer de Provence, a 91 mile long metre gauge railway running through spectacular scenery in the south of France that I visited in 1984.

Today’s Voies Ferrées du Velay runs for 37 kilometers through the French Départments of Ardèche and Haute-Loire from Dunières to Saint Agrève.

The Chemin du Fer Blanc-Argent was a single track metre gauge cross country railway linking various lines of the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans (PO) running through the departments of Loiret, Loir-et-Cher and Indre in France.

What is now the Spa Valley Railway was in 1983 a railway backwater facing imminent closure.  This year has seen the Spa Valley Railway reopen Birchden Junction to run alongside Network Rail to the shared station at Eridge.

Over recent years there’s been a flurry of activity to build new steam locomotives from scratch and to convert existing Barry wrecks into long lost other classes.  Generally I’m not a supporter of such projects – but the story of the conversion of 78059 to "84030" is an exception.