Railway journeys of sardinia (and yorkshire!)

Why is a Sardinian tour company posting about a steam railway experience in Yorkshire 🤔

It’s not as random as it appears – rail enthusiasts in the UK and on the island have a lot in common! 🚂

A massive round of applause to the volunteers who keep the Keighly and Worth Valley heritage railway near Leeds running. And to York Theatre Royal for mounting Bradford 2025 City of Culture's outstanding production of E. Nesbitt’s classic novel The Railway Children in an engine shed there this summer!

The undisputed star of the show was the still-working Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Class 25 0-6-0 that appeared in the 1970 film version of the story, which puffed on and off the ‘stage’, looking not a day over its nearly 140 years!

So, that was the experience that inspired us to publish this blog – which has been nagging to be written since we first tried (and failed) to organise an excursion on Sardinia’s extraordinary narrow gauge network, way back in 2017. Unreliable timetables, confusing marketing, and a general lack of information at the time made it impossible to plan ahead for guests with any confidence.

The Worth Valley Railway is a brilliant example of what passion and partnerships can achieve. Kept alive by enthusiasts since 1968, it’s brought thousands of visitors into Keighley, West Yorkshire over the years, boosting the local economy and the town’s pride, while also helping to attract millions of pounds worth of investment for a community that was hollowed out by the closure of the cloth mills.

Rail enthusiasts in Sardinia – and there are many of them – have similarly worked hard to keep their heritage lines open in areas of the country that aren’t usually top of the visitor destination list but could benefit from significant injections of cash. Sadly, despite the Herculean task of keeping lines cleared, tunnels safe and original rolling stock running, their network hasn’t enjoyed quite as much success.

The Victorian responsible for the five miles of track between Keighley and Oxenhope in Yorkshire was John McLandsborough, a contemporary of the much more prolific railway engineer, Benjamin Piercy (below), who’s a bit of a legend in Sardinia. McLandsborough and Piercy would almost certainly have been aware of one another’s endeavours.

Pulling out of Keighley station on the Worth Valley Railway

The world of 19^th century civil engineers was populated by polymaths such as these: public spirited, curious and with unstoppable determination.

McLandsborough was also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and set up a meteorological station in Bradford. He established a Mutual Improvement Society and later helped oversee a local Mechanics Institute of education, wrote books, and amassed such a sizeable mineral and fossil collection that it passed into public ownership on his death.

He was inspired to construct a railway through the Worth Valley after travelling to Haworth to pay his respects to the Bronte family, who had been regular visitors to the Institute. The last leg of his journey had to be made by foot because the track ran out at Keighley. So he persuaded the owners of 15 cloth mills along the route to invest £36,000 and set himself the task of getting 100-ton engines, pulling wagons of coal to fuel the steam-driven looms, up the 320ft climb. It was a way of providing a passenger service to villagers at no cost to the public purse!

Piercy's Sardinian narrow gauge railway was a feat of high-altitude engineering

Benjamin Piercy, who took on building Sardinia’s railway network around the same time that McLandsborough was laying tracks in Yorkshire, had a much harder task.

He was initially brought in by the Italian government to take over from local engineers who’d failed to deliver a railway for the island on time and on budget, defeated by its mountainous interior. Having successfully completed the standard gauge network, Piercy turned his attention to giving Sardinians in the remotest areas narrow gauge branch lines that were capable of carrying trains up to 4,000 feet. Such a challenge didn’t faze him. He had, after all, already built similar services in his native Wales.

The Desulo-Tonara railway station, in Sardinia, along the Isili-Sorgono railway, in the first years of operation

It’s these lines, clinging on to the Sardinian mountainside, giving a spectacular and unique view of the island, that the doughty volunteers preserved for years as best they could. But politics and poor co-ordination meant attempts to promote them to rail enthusiasts and tourists were only partially successful. Then, in 2022, a €62million grant from the EU to maintain and improve the routes from Isili-Sorgono, Mandas-Arbatax, Macomer-Bosa and Sassari-Tempio-Palau as a tourist asset promised a new era for Sardinia’s narrow gauge. Managed by the island’s public transport company ARST, it's hoped that by next year, the iron legacy left by Piercy, which brought prosperity and freedom to some of Sardinia’s most remote communities, will unlock a similar new era of growth.  

Benjamin Piercy, a Welsh civil engineer, built Sardinia's railway network

Piercy was subsequently made a Commendatore of the Crown of Italy in acknowledgment of the great national service he had performed in laying 300 miles of track.

The railway project kept him in Sardinia for 25 years. He fell in love with the island, settled in the Badde Salighes (valley of the willows) and focussed his attention on agriculture. He invested millions of lira in a 1,000-acre estate, planting extensive vineyards and orchards, introducing new breeds of livestock and sharing new methods of husbandry and mechanical cultivation with fellow farmers, significantly improving production. Notably, he established thousands of fast-growing eucalyptus trees to drain the swamps that contributed to Sardinia's high incidence of malaria, a killer that caused large tracts of land to be abandoned to the mosquitos. He recreated a very British country house and gardens for his family near Nuoro where they entertained both royalty and politicians, including Guiseppi Garibaldi. Villa Piercy is now a museum and the grounds are open for the public to visit.

Like McLandsborough, Piercy was a visionary, who when he saw a problem, fixed it.

Yorkshire has The Railway Children. Sardinia has its Father of the Railway. Maybe one day, we’ll be sitting in an engine shed there, watching his story play out!

We work with local tour guides who are expert in Sardinia's railway history. If you would like to climb aboard one of our tours, send us a message! 

If you are a railway enthusiast who would like to collaborate with railway volunteers in Sardinia, let us know!

A carriage due for renovation, parked outside the National Railway Museum in Cagliari, which reopened to the public in June 2025 following an extended period of closure