Yes, it's a paywall, but ... I've run into a situation before where I get a blank page or an error message that looks like a paywall notice when I just click on the news item, because trainnews opens the link in a Trainnews context. Some news sites don't like to be framed or embedded and spew a nastygram. That may be what you saw.

The way around it is simple: always right click the news item link and open it in a new tab or (non-private) window. That brings it up in the news site's context, not Trainnews, and the news site is (more or less) happy. Your ad blocker then works as designed, also.