Cromford Canal, Butterley Tunnel west portal (1963)

The history of inland waterways in Britain has gained a fresh chapter within the past generation.  When the author Tom Rolt (1910-1974) struggled to navigate silted and derelict waterways before and after the Second World War in his narrow boat Cressy it seemed inevitable that water transport had at best a minimal place in the future economy.

Not least through the campaigning energy of Rolt and his quarrelsome colleagues who founded the Inland Waterways Association, political momentum built up, first to save barely navigable waterways from destruction and ultimately to resuscitate canals that were thought irretrievably lost – among them, the Rochdale, the Huddersfield Narrow, the Chesterfield, the Hereford & Worcester, the Lancaster, the Manchester, Bolton & Bury and the Montgomery.  Now canals that were proposed over two centuries ago and never built, such as the link between the Sheffield and Chesterfield Canals, are seriously discussed:  Rother Link – Wikipedia.

There is clearly much more to this than air-headed enthusiasm.  The growth of leisure boating (of which Tom Rolt was a famous pioneer), the real-estate possibilities of waterside property and the recognition that waterways are an amenity not an eyesore have led to an environmental revolution.

My first personal experience of inland waterways was exploring the Cromford Canal in Derbyshire in the early 1960s, just as its course was repeatedly broken up by mining subsidence, opencasting, road upgrading and industrial development.

Fifty years later, the upper five miles from Ambergate to Cromford is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI] while the bottom three miles from Ironville to Langley Mill has been completely obliterated by opencast mining.  In between, the obstructions include industrial installations, at least one bungalow and a major trunk road.

Repeated collapses within the Butterley Tunnel put paid to through traffic as far back as 1900 and provided easy justification for abandoning this particularly scenic waterway.  In fact, now that coal mining has ceased in the area, the tunnel appears to be stable, and an intrepid canoeist, Robin Witter, surveyed a substantial length of it in 1979:  Butterley Tunnel | Friends of the Cromford Canal.  Tina Cordon made a more extensive exploration from both ends of the tunnel in October-November 2006:  Microsoft Word – Butterley Tunnel Survey Edited.doc (tinas-sliderules.me.uk).

It’s no longer facile to suggest the restoration of long-vanished canals.  There are now sufficient examples of resurrected waterways to provide economic and amenity arguments for schemes that in Rolt’s time seemed utterly impractical.

In each case, it won’t happen quickly, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

For more information see the website of the Waterway Recovery Group – http://www.waterways.org.uk/wrg.

Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

One of the peculiar attributes of the Cromford & High Peak Railway was that it provided water-supply, not only for its own engines but also for adjacent farms and quarries on the high limestone hills that it traversed.

The water was carried along the line in trains of reused locomotive tenders which were filled from a spring at High Peak Wharf.  One of these tenders was rescued when the line closed in 1967 and ultimately ended up in the reserve collection of the National Railway Museum.

This fascinating but unspectacular piece of railway archaeology would hardly attract attention in the main museum at York, and has been loaned to the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway [http://www.e-v-r.com] in Derbyshire, where it’s locally relevant.  There it stands, in a siding, labelled “Cromford” as you’d expect.

Apparently, this is incorrect.  Someone at the Middleton Top Visitor Centre [http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/countryside/countryside_sites/visitor_centres/middleton_top/default.asp], which is beside the actual trackbed of the C&HPR, has interviewed the last surviving engine-driver, who is adamant the tender at Wirksworth couldn’t possibly have got up the cable-hauled Middleton Incline.

It has six wheels.  All the tenders based at Cromford had four wheels:  indeed, the six-wheeled versions had their middle wheels removed precisely so they could breast the top of the inclines.

The tender now at Wirksworth must have come from the other end of the line.  Perhaps it should say “Parsley Hay” on the side.

Does this matter?  Certainly not to 99.9% of the EVR’s visitors.  But it shows that to make historical and archaeological facts as accurate as possible, it’s important to listen to living witnesses.  Oral history matters, even if it’s as prone to misinterpretation as written or moving-image evidence.

Peak Rail, Rowsley, Derbyshire: British Railways D2284

Wandering round the Peak Rail site at Rowsley South in Derbyshire, I came across a gentleman in a shed surrounded by more 1960s and 1970s heavy diesel shunting locomotives than you could shake a stick at.

Peak Rail provides a home and facilities for a number of specialist rail-preservation societies, and I was intrigued by the work of the Heritage Shunters Trust [http://www.heritageshunters.co.uk], who conserve and commemorate an extraordinary episode in the non-development of British Railways.

When the Attlee government nationalised the railways in 1948, the initial policy was to run the railways on steam and coal-fired electricity to make best use of the British coal industry.  Only later did the cheapness of imported oil become economically irresistible.

After British Railways decided in 1955 to phase out steam (having built over 3,500 locomotives since 1948, 999 of them to brand-new designs) there was a rush to obtain sufficient diesel locomotives on a one-for-one replacement basis.  In particular, small, heavy-duty steam shunters were replaced by a great variety of diesel equivalents, some to designs which had not been fully tried and tested.

This policy ignored the fact that single-wagon loads of freight were diminishing, as road transport became more efficient and cost-effective.  By the mid-1960s increasing amounts of rail freight were moving in train-loads not wagon-loads and there was less and less need for shunting locomotives.

This huge, diverse fleet proved to have been a waste of money, and not all of them were capable of doing the job they were intended for.  As pieces of engineering history, however, the different designs are fascinating.

There are over twenty of these engines at Rowsley, some fully restored, others awaiting attention.  I asked my guide what the display policy was – is it an art gallery of locomotive design, or do the workable engines have a practical function?  There is, after all, not much more shunting to do at Rowsley than there was on British Railways after the 1960s.

The major annual jamboree when the working shunters get an outing used to be the Shunter Hunter weekend when the Trust took over the Peak Rail line and worked all the passenger services.  This put up to ten shunting locomotives on the line.

As a means of raising funds to help volunteers preserve the engineering heritage it was a worthwhile enterprise.  And it was entertaining into the bargain.

The Shunter Hunter weekend has now become part of Peak Rail’s Diesel Weekend:  http://www.peakrail.co.uk/dieselweekend. 

Middleton Top Engine, Cromford & High Peak Railway, Derbyshire

The Ecclesbourne Valley Railway runs an excellent ‘Rails and Quarries‘ tour from their Wirksworth station, using their diesel railcar to run up the steepest section of line in use in the UK – 1 in 27 – to Ravenstor, the foot of a slightly mysterious incline that connected with the Cromford & High Peak Railway at Middleton Bottom.

The day I visited, the guide was Vince Morris – informative, professional and endlessly patient with people who struggle with stiles.  His itinerary involved a steep climb through the National Stone Centre [http://www.nationalstonecentre.org.uk] to the High Peak Trail [http://www.derbyshire-peakdistrict.co.uk/thehighpeaktrail.htm], which follows the trackbed of the Cromford & High Peak Railway, up the 1 in 8½ incline to Middleton Top Engine House and then over the fields and through the derelict moonscape of Middle Peak Quarry and back through the centre of Wirksworth.

Middleton Top Winding Engine [http://www.middleton-leawood.org.uk] is an interesting survival, the only remaining example of eight built by the Butterley Company to haul trains up and down the inclines which in 1825 were judged the most effective and economical method of running a railway over the Peak massif.  William Jessop II was a director of both the Butterley Company and the C&HPR:  his younger brother, Josias, had engineered the railway though he died during the construction period.  The total cost of the railway, when it was completed in 1831, was £149,206 16s 8d.  Of this the eight winding engines cost £20,000.

More significantly, the largest single item of expenditure was for cast-iron rails, provided by the Butterley Company for £61,950.  The Butterley Ironworks was incapable at that time of manufacturing wrought-iron rails, so that when the railway wanted to replace horses with locomotives (as Josias Jessop had suggested in his initial specification), the track couldn’t stand the weight and had to be re-laid in wrought iron from end to end.

As the Americans say, do the math.

This unique railway, which was technologically sound when it was promoted in 1825 and an anachronism almost as soon as it opened in 1831, continued to work with periodic modifications on the principle that if it works, don’t fix it.  Middleton Top stopped winding in 1963, but at the Sheep Pasture Incline further down the line a steam engine built in 1883 was replaced with an electric winder in 1965.  The entire line finally closed in 1967.

As the French say, C’est la vie.

Events on the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway can be found at Events 2021 – Ecclesbourne Valley Railway (e-v-r.com).