Mansion House Station, London Underground: hydraulic buffer stop
At the end of a platform at Mansion House Underground Station stands a strange-looking urn.
The track has been lifted from Platform 2 because all trains through the station use Platforms 1 and 3.
The buffer stop that protected the terminal track for trains reversing westward remains, however, and the “urn” indicates that it’s a fine example of a hydraulic design by the Ipswich manufacturer Ransomes & Rapier.
The vessel attached to the buffer contains water or hydraulic fluid under pressure, and is designed to resist the sudden force of a vehicle which has failed to stop.
It doesn’t need to be an ornate shape, but elegance is a hallmark of Victorian engineering.
This item of paraphernalia, ignored by the vast proportion of Underground travellers, is a piece of deep arcana that has attracted the attention of rail enthusiasts who specialise in infrastructure and it’s clear that there are or were numerous examples throughout the London Underground system and further afield.
Two preserved railways in the UK have examples of Ransome & Rapier buffers – the Great Central Railway (Loughborough) at Leicester North and the Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust at Midsomer Norton.
In Districtdavesforum there’s discussion about whether TfL could be persuaded to donate an example to the excellent but already crowded Ipswich Transport Museum, which is an admirable thought.
Fenchurch Street Station is an anomaly among London rail termini, tucked away down a back street from Fenchurch Street itself , serving only local lines as far out as Southend and Shoeburyness, and lacking any direct link to the Underground.
Its charming façade, designed by George Berkeley (1853-54), looks out on to a modest urban square and the entrance leads by lifts and escalators to four platforms at the level of the viaduct that carries the tracks.
It has a number of historic claims: it stands on a site rich in archaeology of the Roman period; when it opened in 1841 it boasted the first railway station bookstall, pioneered by William Marshall who supplied newspapers wholesale to the Great Western Railway; it’s associated with the first on-train railway murder in July 1864, when Mr Thomas Briggs, aged 70, was robbed and killed on a train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney by Franz Muller, who fled to New York where he was arrested and returned to Britain, found guilty and suffered one of the last public hangings outside Newgate Prison in November 1864.
Fenchurch Street was the first railway terminus to reach within the City of London boundary, followed by Cannon Street (1863-6) serving the area south of the Thames, and Liverpool Street (1874) which became the major terminus for train services to East Anglia and beyond.
Originally built for the 3½-mile-long London & Blackwall Railway, much of which, as far as the West India Docks, was built on a brick viaduct, this isolated line was built to the unusual gauge of 5ft 0½in and neither of its termini admitted steam locomotives: cable-hauled trains ran in by their own momentum and out again aided by a shove from the station staff.
This couldn’t last. When other railways brought their services to Fenchurch Street the intensity of traffic necessitated steam locomotives, and the London & Blackwall was converted to the standard 4ft 8½in gauge in 1849.
After successive amalgamations the lines out of Fenchurch Street were operated by two companies, the Great Eastern Railway and the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, which was taken over by the Midland Railway in 1912.
It’s always been a busy station, though the lines it served provided uncomfortable services because of overcrowding. Electric trains took over from steam in 1961, but the increasing weight of traffic made the old LT&SR route notorious as the “misery line”.
A major refurbishment, which entirely closed the station for seven weeks in 1994, replaced track, signals and power supply, and a further upgrade took place in 2013.
1970s plans to bring the proposed Fleet Line through Fenchurch Street came to nothing, and the scheme later opened as the Jubilee Line, eventually reaching Stratford in 1999.
Tower Hill Underground Station is a matter of minutes away, as is the Docklands Light Railway Tower Hill Station.
Discussions have taken place to expand Fenchurch Street to six platforms by taking over the site of the DLR Tower Gateway station, running DLR services into an expanded Tower Hill Underground station.
Fenchurch Street was handling around 16 million passengers a day before the pandemic, slightly less than Cannon Street. It remains to be seen how many of those passengers return in the next few years.
Stagecoach Supertram no 120 (February 2013)First South Yorkshire bus no: 37528First South Yorkshire bus no: 37229
In 2010, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of Sheffield’s first-generation tram system, Stagecoach Supertram, its light-rail successor, repainted one of their units in a near-approximation of the distinctive Sheffield Corporation azure-blue-and-cream livery.
I sense that the blue isn’t exactly authentic, but it’s a close match and it suits the lines of the 1994 Siemens-Deuwag unit.
The livery on this tram is still a familiar sight on Sheffield’s streets over ten years later, and when the unit, no: 120, was involved in a collision with another, no: 118, in 2015, the undamaged sections of 120 were attached to the undamaged end of 118 which was repainted to match.
Correspondingly, the two damaged ends were united and sent for repair.
The insistent nostalgia for old liveries extended to Sheffield’s buses when First South Yorkshire commemorated the centenary of bus operation in Sheffield in 2013. Two double-deckers appeared in approximations of traditional Sheffield liveries.
One of them, no: 37229, looks well in the 1935 azure-blue-and-cream Sheffield livery, re-registered from YN08 LCJ to a more authentic plate 3910 WE belonging to a long-retired double-decker, and the visible fleet-number was truncated to 229.
The other repaint, no: 37528 (YN58 ETX), is less successful, because the contemporary Prussian-blue-and-cream tram livery was adapted for modestly-proportioned 1913 buses and it simply doesn’t fit the bulky lines of a modern double-decker. The vehicle carries an appropriatefake fleet number 1.
The most endearing aspect of the livery on 37528 is that it carries the name of the long-serving and highly respected general manager of Sheffield Corporation Tramways, Arthur R Fearnley, who is credited with building Sheffield’s public transport system into a source of great pride in the city. His grandson, Giles Fearnley, was Managing Director of First Bus from 2011 to 2020.
I’m intrigued that modern bus operators are making an effort to perpetuate the liveries of their predecessors.
Nostalgia apart, it’s apparent that modern vehicles actually look better in heritage liveries, not simply because of the choice of colours and typography, but because up to the 1970s it never occurred to anyone to ignore the natural proportions of the bodywork. The garish colours and the swoops and swirls of some modern liveries are what Cecil Beaton, referring to the Duchess of Devonshire’s flower beds, described as a “retina irritant”.
When you emerge from the Berlin S-bahn station, Anhalter Bahnhof, you’re confronted with the vestigial remains of the late nineteenth-century inter-city main-line terminus of the same name, a reminder of a different Berlin that’s largely disappeared.
The earliest railways to reach Berlin each terminated at their own station – Postdamer Bahnhof (1838) from Potsdam and the Anhalter Bahnhof (1839) from Anhalt. These were followed by the Frankfurter Bahnhof (1842), the Stettiner Bahnhof (1842) from Stettin (now Szczecin) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (1846-47).
The Berlin rail system went through frequent and radical realignments during the nineteenth century and the original Anhalter Bahnhof was completely and magnificently rebuilt in 1876-80 to the designs of Franz Heinrich Schwechten (1841-1924) as a major terminus under an iron-and-glass trainshed, said to be the largest in continental Europe though smaller than St Pancras.
The bombastic glazed brick façade was decorated with sculptures — figures representing Night and Day by Ludwig Brunow (1843-1913) flanking the clock, and International Traffic by Emil Hundrieser (1846-1911) crowning the central pediment.
Albert Speer’s 1930s scheme for a world capital [Welthauptstadt] called Germania to celebrate the anticipated Nazi victory in the Second World War would have severed the approach tracks to the station, which Speer proposed to convert into a swimming pool.
After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 inaugurated the Final Solution plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Anhalter Bahnhof, unlike the other Berlin stations that transported Jews in freight wagons, provided ordinary carriages with armed guards, attached to scheduled services, to give the impression that elderly Jews were being taken to a well-deserved retirement.
The terminus was practically put out of action by Allied bombing in November 1943 and February 1945, and although the Allies restored services from 1946, the East Berlin authorities took a dim view of trains from East Germany arriving at a terminus in the American sector, and diverted all traffic to the Ostbahnhof in 1952.
The station stood empty and unused until 1960 when most of it was demolished. In response to public protests the central portion of Schwechten’s façade was retained and cleaned. Brunow’s statues were replaced by reproductions so that the originals could be shown at the German Museum of Technology built on former railway land nearby.
The footprint of the station platforms and tracks is occupied by an all-weather football pitch and a concert venue, Tempodrom. Alongside, a vast bunker constructed as a shelter in 1943 houses the Berlin Story Museum, an exercise in dark tourism from which no-one emerges feeling cheerful, telling the story of twentieth-century Berlin warts and all: www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/germany/15-countries/individual-chapters/230-anhalter-train-station-ruins-and-bunker.
The “Birmingham Railway Mafia” has left its fingerprints all over the early history of the rail-preservation movement in Britain.
From the early 1950s such individuals as the writer Tom Rolt (1910-1974), the photographer Ivo Peters (1915-1989) and the businessman Patrick Whitehouse (1922-1993), among others, were involved in saving the Talyllyn and Ffestiniog railways in North Wales and establishing the Tyseley Railway Centre in Birmingham.
Patrick Whitehouse persuaded British Railways to sell him a former Great Western Railway locomotive for £750, and with a Talylynn colleague, Pat Garland, sought a suitable branch railway on which to run it.
They secured the Totnes-Ashburton branch line in Devon, which still had track in place, and opened what was then the Dart Valley Railway – now operating as the South Devon Railway – in 1969.
There was, however, a catch in the deal.
For two years, the rail service ran the full length of the line and locomotives were stabled at the Ashburton terminus.
In 1971, however, the Ministry of Transport exercised its right to take over the trackbed north of Buckfastleigh and use it to improve the A38 trunk road.
The heritage line was permanently cut back to Buckfastleigh station, yet the historically significant Ashburton station with its overall roof, dating back to 1872, still remains intact, fifty years after the last train left.
It’s now a garage and is well-maintained, but the surrounding land has commercial development potential that could destroy its historic significance.
The Friends of Ashburton Station launched a detailed and ambitious scheme to convert the passenger station as a prelude to a long-term plan to reconnect with the operational railway at Buckfastleigh, but the latest news on its website is dated September 2015: Friends of Ashburton Station.
It’s hard to tell how the railway could co-exist with the further planned improvements to the A38, but restoring a significant historic structure in the middle of Ashburton would be a benefit, and the detail of the 2015 scheme inspires confidence that the project has been carefully thought-out.
On January 14th 2022, fifty-four years after the last train crossed Bennerley Viaduct, the “Iron Giant” reopened, providing public access to magnificent views across the Erewash Valley on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border.
Its wrought-iron construction made demolition inordinately expensive; the demise of most similar viaducts ensured its listing at Grade II* and, most important of all, its location near to the Derbyshire town of Ilkeston meant that local people held it in their hearts.
The novelist D H Lawrence (1885-1930), born in nearby Eastwood, mentions it repeatedly in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. For local youths, clambering in the girders as the trains rumbled overhead was an adolescent rite of passage. Its distinctive shape told local travellers they were nearly home.
After the railway closed the viaduct survived a succession of vicissitudes until Sustrans, the charity which oversees the National Cycle Network, devised a scheme to fund its renovation.
When Sustrans backed away from the project in 2018, the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct worked with Railway Paths Ltd, the owner of the viaduct, to find the means to make it accessible as a community asset.
I visited the viaduct within a week of its opening with my mate Richard, who often rides shotgun on my history explorations.
We took a train to Ilkeston Station, from where it’s an easy walk up the Erewash Canal towpath to cross the viaduct by a newly-constructed ramp at the west end and steps at the east, returning by the Nottingham Canal towpath to the station.
There must have been at least fifty people on the deck on a cold January midday, enjoying the new experience and full of curiosity.
The Friends of Bennerley Viaduct have brought long-term benefits to local people, dog-walkers, joggers and cyclists, bird-watchers and nature lovers, as well as rail enthusiasts and industrial archaeologists.
The restoration cost of £1.7 million was met in part by railway heritage organisations (the Railway Heritage Trust, Railway Paths and Railway Ramblers), national heritage organisations (Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund) and the local authority, Broxtowe Borough Council.
Richard was intrigued by the sheer variety of other charities that had contributed to the restoration, and back home he researched the less obvious ones:
the Charles Hayward Foundation, set up in 1961 by Sir Charles Hayward (1892-1983), a Midlands-based businessman whose engineering company Electrical & General Industrial Trusts Ltd eventually became part of the Firth Cleveland group
the World Monuments Fund, a New York-based non-profit organisation founded in 1965 to preserve architectural and cultural heritage sites around the world
the Headley Trust, a division of the Sainsbury Family Trust, which makes awards to projects both in the UK and overseas supporting causes from arts and heritage to education, health and social welfare and overseas development
the Pilgrim Trust, established in the UK in 1930 by an American philanthropist Edward (‘Ned’) Harkness (1874-1940), son of one of the founders of Standard Oil, and dedicated to the UK’s “most urgent needs” and for “protecting its future well-being”
the H B Allen Charitable Trust, founded in 1987 by Miss Heather Barbara ‘Mickie’ Allen (d 2005), a descendant of James Burrough, the founder of Beefeater Gin
the Sylvia Waddilove Foundation UK, a trust bequeathed by the Bradford-born textile heiress Miss Sylvia Waddilove (1911-2001) which provides grants for a variety of causes, including the preservation of buildings of architectural or historical significance
I admire the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct for three particular reasons: they are clearly rooted in an energetic local community; they manage mainstream and social media extremely well, and – as Richard discovered – they are adept at finding financial support from eclectic sources.
No-one much under seventy can now remember travelling in a train over Bennerley Viaduct, but there is footage of a journey from Derby Friargate to Nottingham Victoria shortly before the passenger service ended on September 7th 1964: A short film of the Friargate Line – YouTube.
The Blackpool Tramway is a monument to the entire history of railed street transport in Britain.
Blackpool had the very first electric street tramway in Britain, opened in 1885, and it now runs a modern light rapid-transit (LRT) service, alongside a varied collection of heritage trams for tourists and enthusiasts.
Until after the First World War three tram operators between Fleetwood and Lytham St Annes each ran two fleets – entirely conventional trams for local traffic alongside a range of designs to cater for crowds of holidaymakers who wanted to ride around enjoying themselves, preferably in the open air when the weather was favourable.
In the 1930s when a new transport manager, Walter Luff, was appointed he quickly realised that it would be impossible to handle the Promenade crowds with buses, particularly in the autumn Illuminations period.
He commissioned a suite of four ultra-modern tram designs primarily to work the Promenade service – luxurious, streamlined single- and double-deckers, some of them open to the fresh air for summer services.
After the Second World War, while every other tram operator in the country went over to electric trolleybuses or diesel motor buses Blackpool still needed the segregated Promenade tracks, stretching from Starr Gate in the south to the outskirts of Fleetwood in the north, to shift the crowds up and down the Promenade efficiently with the best possible view of the Illuminations.
New trams were far more expensive than new buses, however, so the 1930s fleet soldiered on, patched, repaired and many of them rebuilt in new guises.
The only completely new trams to be added to the fleet after the 1950s were eight Centenary cars, built around the time of the tramway’s hundredth anniversary in 1985, when Government subsidies became available for new trams as well as buses.
Eventually the game was up, and the Victorian tramway was upgraded to modern LRT standards, with a fleet of sixteen sleek articulated trams which took over the basic service in 2012.
Nowadays, the Blackpool Tramway has three fleets: the LRT cars are the “A” fleet, nine modified 1934-35 double-deck Balloon cars are the “B” fleet with widened doorways so they can stop at the raised LRT platforms, and the “C” fleet is a huge and varied collection of rolling stock dating back to, and before, the 1930s modernisation. Some of these trams are operational; others await repair or restoration.
The “C” fleet’s traditional home, Rigby Road depot, had an uncertain future in the period when the LRT fleet was planned and installed. The new fleet eventually went to a purpose-built depot at Starr Gate, and Rigby Road was designated the base for the heritage fleet, despite a long-standing backlog of building maintenance.
It’s now intended to double as a working tram depot and a museum, branded as Tramtown. The building needs attention to make it weatherproof, and some at least of the relics on wheels that have fetched up there need to move elsewhere to increase display space.
Great Central Railway, Loughborough: British Railways Class 20 locomotive D8098
Many of the new diesel locomotives that British Railways ordered to replace steam were either useful for tasks that were no longer needed or simply useless, yet the solution to the need for a flexible, adaptable, light freight locomotive already existed.
While such white elephants as Class 17 (1962-65) and Class 14 (1964-65) were devised, ordered, constructed and found wanting, the first batch of 128 English Electric Type 1 locomotives, later designated Class 20, had been built between 1957 and 1962.
They conformed to the misguided thinking of the time, ironically – a design based on the American switcher, rated at 1,000hp with a maximum speed of 75mph, lacking a train-heating boiler and so unsuitable for passenger trains except in hot weather.
The cab filled one end, and much of the locomotive frame was given to a long bonnet which concealed the single English Electric power unit, its weight providing adhesion for hauling heavy loads.
By the mid-1960s British Rail were lumbered with various patterns of unsuitable locomotives as the need for light freight locomotives declined, and the Class 20 proved adaptable to a range of purposes.
Crucially, they were capable of operating as multiple units – two or three locos driven from one cab – so they could handle heavier loads without increasing crew costs.
Marshalling them in pairs nose to nose provided the driver with maximum visibility of the road ahead in either direction.
Some even appeared on passenger trains, in tandem with other classes fitted with heating boilers.
Indeed, in 1966 BR ordered another hundred Class 20s to replace the ragbag designs that had to be junked quickly.
They lasted well, and turned up in unexpected places, such as the construction phases of the Channel Tunnel and High Speed One. Of the original 228, 39 are still in existence.
They have proved popular with the leasing companies that supplement current operators’ traction needs, such as Direct Rail Services and Harry Needle Railroad Company (HNRC).
And they are usefully employed on heritage railways. Known to enthusiasts as “Choppers” because their exhaust resembles a helicopter, their noise is instantly recognisable, redolent of a particular period of British railway history, shortly after the demise of steam.
PeakRail, Matlock, Derbyshire: British Railways Class 14 locomotive D9539
Apart from the profligate construction of untried and untested designs, the other problem with British Railways’ hastily ordered diesel fleet in the 1950s was the failure to visualise the changes that were about to overtake the transport industry.
When the order went out to replace steam locomotives with diesel, the British Railways Board ordered one-for-one replacements.
There seems to have been little appreciation that the growth of road transport and the government’s huge post-war investment in motorways would inevitably rebalance the opportunities for railways to make money into and beyond the 1960s.
So there was no long-term need to replace hundreds of small steam shunting engines with a diesel equivalent, and many of these new locomotives lay idle in store or were scrapped without being much used, whether or not their designs had proved fit for purpose.
British Railways Class 14, built at the BR works at Swindon (1964-65), was an attempt to construct a light shunter with better visibility than the steam locomotives it was intended to replace.
Twenty-six were ordered initially in 1963, followed by a further thirty before the first actual locomotive was completed.
Like the ubiquitous and highly successful 08 family of shunters, Class 14 had steam-locomotive driving wheels and connecting rods to provide adhesion and stability, but they were underpowered for some of the tasks that were available to them.
They were withdrawn from service from 1970 onwards, not because of design deficiencies but because the work for which they were intended – shunting single-wagon loads, pick-up goods trains and short-distance freight – disappeared in a very short time.
Unlike the lamentable Claytons, the Class 14 found a ready market among industrial users, particularly collieries, where many of them worked for twice or three times the length of time they were in the BR fleet.
Latterly, they have proved popular on heritage railways, where they are adept at hauling light passenger trains at relatively low speeds. Of the 56 locomotives built, nineteen still exist in preservation and another five have been exported.
Ambergate Station, Derbyshire: British Railways Class 17 Clayton locomotive (1963)
Once when I was a teenager, out for a bike ride with my mates, I stopped to take a picture of the formerly triangular Ambergate Station, where the former Midland Railway main lines from Derby to Manchester and Sheffield bifurcated.
Decades later, I showed this image to an evening-class group in Matlock and, while the nice old ladies listened patiently, the rail enthusiasts in the audience began to make ecstatic noises.
It turned out that the locomotive in the picture was a considerable rarity.
Even I could see it was non-standard, painted in red ochre, with a centre cab and long bonnets concealing the engines.
This was an example of British Railways Class 17, known colloquially as “Claytons” after their manufacturer, one of a number of pilot designs commissioned after the decision was taken to replace steam traction with diesel under the 1955 Modernisation Plan.
The Claytons were a notorious result of indecisive and confused planning, undue haste to deliver untested innovatory designs, and the sheer stupidity of ordering off-plan without waiting for a prototype to be completed.
Built by Clayton Engineering Company and Beyer, Peacock & Company between 1962 and 1965, the design was an attempt to devise a single-cab locomotive with adequate visibility for the driver. It failed.
Earlier prototypes had followed the pattern of the American “switcher” shunter, with a cab at one end behind a single large power unit. Like the steam locomotives they replaced, which traditionally placed the cab behind the boiler and firebox, they gave the crew a limited view of the road ahead.
Providing adequate sight-lines from the Claytons’ single central cab necessitated twin power units, low enough for the driver to see past them, and these were inadequate and unreliable. Indeed, the sightlines were still unsatisfactory because the length of the bonnets masked the track immediately ahead of the front buffers.
Some of the later deliveries of Class 17 were immediately withdrawn from the active list and stored.
After the last of 117 Class 17 locos had been delivered in 1965, the first withdrawals took place in 1968, and by 1971 they were all scrapped except one, D8568, which was sold for industrial use and is now based at the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway, Oxfordshire, where it operates from time to time.
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