In 1922 Alex Schwab went up to Emmanual College, Cambridge to read Mechanical Sciences, and in the same year the railway took delivery of its first locomotive, supplied by the local Sheffield engineering firm of Jupp.

In 1931 public open days commenced, in support of charitable causes, and this led to a considerable expansion of the passenger coach fleet, and also the rebuilding of the locomotive into a far more powerful design.

Certain earthworks and sheds remained at the site of the railway, as well as other tangible reminders of the line including a deep locomotive inspection pit, a turntable pit, the main engine shed and erecting shop, and a lengthy, and elegant, brick tunnel; another survivor was the substantial locomotive air-raid shelter, designed to protect the engines from a direct hit by a German bomb.

Subsequently the entire site was acquired by property developers, and a new housing estate was constructed, rendering all final traces of the line lost.

Alex Schwab had an innovative design concept for a Great Western Railway-type locomotive of mogul wheel arrangement, but with an oversized boiler by GWR standards.