Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Trains to Looe

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Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

The train-ride from Liskeard (rhymes with “hard” not “heard”) to Looe is one of the most bizarre as well as attractive journeys on the British rail system.

Trains to Looe start from a platform at right angles to the Cornish main line, and the train sets off northwards, which is disconcerting because Looe is due south.

In the course of two miles the route drops 205 feet by turning 180°, diving under the main line at the 150-foot Liskeard Viaduct, then turning another 180° to face north once more at Coombe Junction Halt, the second least-used station in Britain.  This spectacular loop has a maximum gradient of 1 in 40 and a minimum-radius curve of eight chains (160 metres).

At Coombe Junction the train reverses and trundles down the East Looe valley, a particularly picturesque route past remote little stations, Causeland, Sandplace and St Keyne Wishing Well Halt [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Keyne_Wishing_Well_Halt_railway_station], until the river opens out into a wide estuary that divides the towns of East and West Looe.

It’s an idyllic piece of railway with a complex history.

The Liskeard & Looe Canal was opened in 1827-8 to develop a traffic carrying copper and tin ore down the valley, and lime and sea-sand for agriculture upstream.  In 1844 the canal linked end-on with the Liskeard & Caradon Railway, a mineral line serving the mines and granite quarries around Caradon Hill.

There was so much traffic that the canal was replaced in 1860 by the railway down the valley, which handled freight only and remained isolated from the Cornwall Railway main line above.

Passenger services began in 1879, running to the now-closed Moorswater station, a long walk and a stiff climb to the town of Liskeard.

The great loop up to Liskeard was installed in 1901, facilitating a boom in passenger traffic and enabling the development of Looe as a resort.

Somehow this eccentric train service has survived the decline in rail travel, probably because bus services to and from Looe are patchy and it’s not an easy place to reach by car:  http://www.looe.org/buses.html.

It’s a delightful part of the Cornish coast, though, and there’s a particular satisfaction in leaving a main-line express at Liskeard, hiking over to Platform 3 and riding down the valley to the sea.

Runaway tram

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Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

By a miracle nobody was killed or injured when the Manx Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 inexplicably ran down the mountain on Wednesday March 30th:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/pictures-runaway-mountain-tram-crash-drama-1-7824668.

Someone must have had a heart-stopping moment when they turned round and found their tram had disappeared.

Fortunately there was no-one on board.

Even more fortunately the tram overturned on the bend before it could reach the road-crossing at the Bungalow. 

A road collision at the Bungalow would certainly have been fatal.  

If instead the tram had continued down the line beyond the Bungalow it would have caused even more destruction, whether somebody had had the presence of mind to set the points to run it into the depot or, worst of all, if it had run on into Laxey, over another main road and into the terminus where there are buildings, crowds of people and possibly other trams.

How an empty, parked tram unexpectedly took off down the steep incline isn’t yet explained, but the restoration of the service within three days indicates confidence that the cause is known and can be certainly avoided in future.  This clip from the Isle of Man News gives more detail:  http://manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/77830/tram-crash-update.

There has never before been a runway on the Snaefell Mountain Railway in 120 years of operation, though there was one on the Llandudno funicular Great Orme Railway in 1932.

Certainly no 3 is matchwood.  It can’t be restored in any meaningful sense, though like its companion no 5, destroyed by fire in 1970, it could be replaced by a close facsimile, which may include components from the original.

Update:  News articles about the subsequent analyses of this incident make interesting reading:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/isle-of-man-newspapers-wins-freedom-of-information-appeal-over-snaefell-tram-crash-1-8337886 and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/runaway-tram-had-defective-brakes-1-8337906.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The flying tram-rail

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Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

On the evening of Thursday December 12th 1940 my Auntie Edna, then a teenager, put on her dancing shoes and caught a tram into Sheffield city-centre to go dancing.  No sooner had she got there than the sirens sounded and she spent twelve terrifying hours in a shelter as the shops and public buildings above were bombed and burnt down.

The following morning she tramped the three miles back to the family home in the East End to be greeted by her father with “And where the bloody hell have you been?”

He had, of course, spent the night watching the red sky over the city-centre knowing his daughter was out there in great danger.

The city of Bristol suffered a succession of air-raids, one of which, on Good Friday 1941, permanently put the tram system out of use by severing the main power cable at Counterslip Bridge.  The story goes that the last car to Kingswood was pushed by its passengers until it could freewheel to the depot.

I thought of Granddad panicking about his daughter’s safety when I found a fearsome memento of the Bristol Blitz, and of Bristol’s tramway, in the churchyard of the grand parish church of St Mary Redcliffe, round the corner from Temple Meads Station.

A sizeable length of tramrail remains embedded among the graves where it landed as it flew over the houses from an adjacent road.

You wouldn’t have wanted to be about when debris as heavy as several yards of tramrail was flying around.

No wonder Granddad was so upset, and so relieved to see his daughter bedraggled but in one piece after the Luftwaffe bombed Sheffield.

Sheffield Central

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Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Sheffield’s self-confessed mapaholic, Mike Spick, does a very fine presentation about mapping Sheffield.  It was strongly recommended to me by a friend, and I caught it at a Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group meeting in January 2016.

One map in particular that Mike showed alerted me to a piece of Sheffield history I’d never heard of before.

A plan of c1890-1895 showed a scheme to link Sheffield’s two competing railways, the Midland and what was then the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, at a combined triangular station to be called Sheffield Central.

The gradients apparently would have been demanding, because the MS&L (from 1896 renamed the Great Central Railway) runs on a viaduct at the point where the Midland burrows beneath it in a cutting.

Clearly the project came to nothing and as far as I know is not mentioned in published histories, but its chronology explains why the Midland Railway brought in their house architect Charles Trubshaw to double the size of their station in 1905, while the Great Central built a new frontage to Sheffield Victoria in 1908.

The site of the unbuilt triangular station is now occupied by the delta junction which connects the three lines of Sheffield Supertram at Park Square.

Closely-guarded secret

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Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Box Tunnel is celebrated for its engineering significance – and for its entertaining legends.

Driven through the unfriendly Cotswold geology, at the time of construction it was, at 3,212 yards, the longest railway tunnel in the world, though several earlier canal tunnels were longer.

Furthermore, Brunel designed it on a gradient of 1 in 100, descending from east to west.  Contemporary critics warned against “the concussion of the atmosphere and the vibration” arising from trains labouring up the grade, and predicted a downhill runaway would leave the tunnel at a speed of 120mph, a calculation which failed to account for friction and air-resistance:  Brunel’s more realistic computation arrived at a speed of 56mph.

The tunnel was ready for the first train to run from London to Bristol on June 30th 1841.  The west portal, visible from the main road through the village of Box, is an elaborate classical composition.  Its arch is far taller than necessary, and the rock-hewn bore funnels to the conventional loading-gauge within.  The plainer east portal at Corsham lies in a cutting.

One of the enduring stories about Box Tunnel is that Brunel aligned it so that the sunrise would shine through the dead-straight bore on the morning of his birthday, April 9th.  This is within the range of practical possibility, apparently, but difficult in the circumstances to check.

The underground Bath stone quarries which lie under Box Hill to the north of Brunel’s railway tunnel have excited considerable speculation.

Ridge Quarry was used as an ammunition store in the First World War until 1922, and became Central Ammunition Depot Corsham in 1934-6.  It was used by the RAF until 1955 and then by the Army until 1964.

A much larger complex comprising some 2¼ million square feet of storage space, based on the former Eastlays, Monkton Farleigh and Tunnel Quarries, was adapted in the 1930s as a huge subterranean ammunition store, Central Ammunition Depot Monkton Farleigh.

This wartime facility was supplied by a narrow-gauge railway and inclines connected to a GWR siding at Shockerwick, just outside the east portal of the main-line tunnel.

In 1940 the Bristol Aircraft Company’s experimental section moved into Spring Quarry, and the Ministry of Aircraft Production built an underground aircraft-engine production plant to avoid disruption from bomb-attacks on Bristol.  Despite a reputed final cost of £20 million, the facility allegedly took four years to build, operated for eighteen months up to the end of the War and produced 523 out of a wartime total of 100,932 Bristol aircraft engines.

RAF Box, later known as RAF Rudloe Manor, was established above ground and within a subterranean area known as Brown’s Quarry to act as an important regional headquarters during and after the Second World War.

In the Cold War era part of Spring Quarry was used to build the Central Government War Headquarters, a 240-acre alternative seat for national government in the event of nuclear attack or civil disruption.  Capable of accommodating four thousand staff for up to three months, it drew its water-supply from an underground lake and was equipped with generators and temperature-control, the second largest telephone-exchange in Britain and a BBC broadcasting studio.

Peter Laurie’s early study of covert government infrastructure, Beneath the City Streets:  A Private Inquiry into the Nuclear Preoccupations of Government (Allen Lane 1970;  revised Panther 1979), pointed out that trains running through Box Tunnel audibly traversed a junction, which – he speculated – would allow trains, including the Royal Train from Slough, to disappear into the safety of an underground citadel.

The actual evacuation procedure apparently involved concentrating staff at Kensington (Olympia) station and transporting them by rail via North Pole Junction and Westbury to Warminster, from where they would be conveyed by road to Corsham.

The Prime Minister and his immediate entourage would be the last to arrive, by helicopter directly to Corsham.

The headquarters was apparently abandoned in 2004.

A further facility, the Corsham Computer Centre was established in the former Hudswell Quarry in the 1980s, and remains part of the Bristol Bath Total Facilities Management Project:  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/280247.html.

According to internet sources which may not be up to date, Eastlays Quarry is now a bonded warehouse:  http://www.nettleden.com/venues/eastlays-quarry.   Monkton Farleigh Quarry was sold in 1976 and briefly opened as a museum in 1984:  http://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/farleigh-down-tunnel-wiltshire.  Ridge Quarry was resold to the original owners in 1975.

In fact, the most accessible information on this former state secret is to be found on the Government website:  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/324883/Corsham_Tunnel_version1.pdf.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Deep Bay Bridge

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Florida Oversea Railway: Bahia Honda Bridge

Florida Oversea Railway: Bahia Honda Bridge

The year I spent Christmas in Florida, it was the only state on the US weather map that wasn’t snow white.

I pottered about in shorts and a T-shirt in glorious sunshine, exploring the extraordinary archipelago and the highway, US1, that leads to the southernmost point of the United States, accompanied by what was then Conch FM, a wonderfully smooth jazz radio-station that, with a characteristically American sense of excess, produced thirty solid hours of Christmas jazz over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

US1 hops across the islands following the route of Henry Morrison Flagler’s Florida Overseas Railroad, which was closed down by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and afterwards converted into the Overseas Highway.

Most of Flagler’s poured-concrete closed-spandrel bridges were easily widened for two-lane motor traffic simply by building lateral cantilever extensions, but the Bahia Honda Bridge created extra difficulties.

“Bahia Honda” means “deep bay”, and because of the depth of the channel, 24 feet at its deepest, the bridge, 5,055 feet – almost a mile – long, has steel trusses, through which trains ran on a single track.

There was no way of widening the trackbed for road vehicles to pass, and a mile-long bridge couldn’t possibly operate as a one-way system controlled by traffic lights.

The solution was to lay a roadbed on top of the truss with ramps at either end, providing a precipitous mile-long driving experience 65 feet above the sea.

The Bahia Honda Bridge remained part of the only way in and out of Key West until it was replaced by a concrete viaduct on a different alignment in 1972.

It remains, unmaintained and gradually deteriorating, a haunting reminder of a time when the only way to Key West was on a train, gingerly picking its way at a maximum speed of 15mph across the ocean.

Christmas in a T-shirt: the Florida Keys

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Florida Oversea Railway: Seven Mile Bridge

Florida Oversea Railway: Seven Mile Bridge

Florida Oversea Railway: Seven Mile Bridge

Florida Oversea Railway: Seven Mile Bridge

It took me three attempts to spend Christmas in Florida.  The first time there were no flights and I ended up in Jordan.  The second time that Florida was full I stayed at home and bought myself a television.

Eventually, in 1999, I hired a car in Miami and drove down the Keys.  The name “Key” derives from the Spanish “cayo”, meaning “small island”.

The road-journey on US Highway 1 down the Florida Keys is unique.  In some places it’s a dreary highway bristling with motels, but for most of the time you drive between the sea and the mangrove swamps.

The highway is mostly built on the trackbed of the Florida Overseas Railroad, the inspiration of one man, Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913), one of the original partners, along with John D Rockefeller, in the great Standard Oil enterprise.

After Henry Flagler had taken his first wife to St Augustine, Florida, for her health in 1878 he pulled back from active involvement in the oil industry and started a second entrepreneurial career extending his Florida East Coast Railway southwards from St Augustine to develop what became Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

In the following years Henry Flagler took the decision to extend his Florida East Coast Railway 128 miles all the way across the archipelago south of Biscayne to Key West, then the largest town in Florida with a population of 20,000.

The string of islands that curves from south-west to west for over seventy miles presented huge engineering challenges.

The seaways between the islands were spanned mostly by closed-spandrel concrete viaducts like the 2.15-mile Long Key Viaduct which consists of 186 35-foot arches carrying the track 31 feet above the sea.

The longest of all these crossings was the Seven Mile Bridge, which curves across the small island of Pigeon Key and is in fact four successive viaducts.  The northern three sections, Knights Key, Pigeon Key and Moser Channel bridges, consist of steel spans laid directly on concrete piers;  the southernmost section, the Pacet Channel Viaduct, has 210 53-foot closed-spandrel concrete arches.  The total length including approaches was actually nearer to nine miles.

Trains crawled along the single track, completely unfenced, at a limited speed of 15mph, for fear of a derailment.

The rationale behind building this prodigious railway, which some at the time dubbed “Flagler’s Folly”, was that Key West was a major coaling station for ships sailing between the New York City and South America, and would be the first and last port in USA territory for ships traversing the Panama Canal, then under construction.  In fact, coaling declined in the twentieth century as vessels increased in range and changed to oil propulsion.

The railroad was literally blown away by a hurricane in 1935, but its spectacular viaducts survive:  the road now traverses modem concrete viaducts alongside, and the disused railway bridges serve as fishing platforms.

Cameron’s cars

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Manx Electric Railway "Tunnel" car 7 and Snaefell Mountain Railway 6 & 1

Manx Electric Railway “Tunnel” car 7 and Snaefell Mountain Railway 6 & 1

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Blackpool & Fleetwood 40

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Blackpool & Fleetwood 40

John Cameron was a Victorian engineer whose career deserves to be better known.

He began his career as a ganger on the Settle & Carlisle Railway in the early 1870s, and was a subcontractor for the Manx Northern Railway in 1878.  He stayed on to serve as secretary and manager of the Manx Northern from 1879, making it the cheapest operational railway in the British Isles, and he built the Foxdale Railway in 1886.

He was appointed consultant engineer for the Douglas-Laxey electric railway and the Snaefell Mountain Railway, but left the island before the electric railway was extended from Laxey to Ramsey and renamed the Manx Electric Railway.

In 1898 he became secretary and manager of the Blackpool & Fleetwood Tramroad.

Both the MER and the Tramroad were promoted by property speculators.  The Manx line started out as a pretext for property development north of Douglas, and became involved in a bubble of enterprise that spread to electricity supply, quarrying and hotels and burst spectacularly in 1900.

The sponsors of the Blackpool & Fleetwood Tramroad, Benjamin Sykes and his business partner Thomas Lumb, between them owned or had significant control over virtually all the undeveloped land along the tramroad route.  They proceeded cautiously, and eventually sold their line to Blackpool Corporation in 1920.

For both these electric railways John Cameron provided very similar rolling stock, flat-fronted box-shaped single-deckers with corner entrances.  The Manx Electric Railway was laid to three-foot gauge track, but the Snaefell Mountain Railway, fitted with a central Fell rail to aid adhesion and braking, is 3ft 6in gauge.  The Blackpool & Fleetwood Tramroad, running along the spacious, gently graded Fylde coast, was built to standard 4ft 8½in gauge.  The obvious similarity of the rolling stock on the two lines is clearly Cameron’s signature.

All three lines remain in operation.  The Manx Electric Railway, though unobtrusively modernised for practical reasons, provides an authentic Victorian travel experience as it grinds its way over the cliffs between Douglas and Ramsey, powered predominantly by John Cameron’s fleet of “Tunnel” cars (1894) and “Winter Saloons” (1899).  (There is no satisfactory explanation of why the narrow “Tunnel” cars are so called.  There are no tunnels on the MER.)

The Snaefell Mountain Railway takes visitors from the MER at Laxey to the top of the island’s highest mountain.

The Blackpool to Fleetwood tramway has been upgraded to modern light-rail standards, and is operated by uncompromisingly modern Bombardier Flexity 2 vehicles.   There remains one survivor of John Cameron’s Blackpool fleet, no 40, built in 1914, now part of the National Tramway Museum fleet at Crich, Derbyshire.

By courtesy of YouTube, it’s possible to enjoy a cab-ride from Starr Gate to Fleetwood in six minutes:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3vsZWf7Y8U.

The Isle of Man moves at a slower pace, and YouTube offers the real-time experience, complete with rain on the window-glass, of a back seat from Ramsey to Douglas in just over an hour:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxhLp7iGOjs.

(There was another railway engineer called John Cameron, who learned his trade in the south of England and became the locomotive superintendent of the Taff Vale Railway 1911-1922.  He died in 1938.)

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

End of the line: Rowsley

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Rowsley Old Station, Derbyshire (1978)

Rowsley Old Station, Derbyshire (1978)

The Manchester, Buxton, Matlock & Midland Junction Railway, the little railway with the long name, was an ambitious project to connect the East Midlands with Lancashire, starting at a junction with the North Midland Railway at a place called Toadhole which the railway renamed Ambergate.

The MBM&MR opened in 1849 through Cromford and Matlock as far north as Rowsley, where the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate bounds the Duke of Rutland’s Haddon estate.

The intention, had there been sufficient capital, was to continue up the Derwent Valley, tunnelling beneath Chatsworth Park, towards Baslow, Edale or Castleton and Chinley to Cheadle.

The 6th “Bachelor” Duke of Devonshire was in favour of this route.  The company chairman was the Duke’s cousin, Lord George Henry Cavendish, and he was succeeded in 1854 by the Duke’s agent, Sir Joseph Paxton.  (Paxton’s original sketch for the Crystal Palace was in fact drawn on a sheet of MBM&MR blotting paper during a directors’ meeting at Derby.)

The 6th Duke died in 1858, and his successor had no intention of letting a railway through Chatsworth.

As it happened, the 5th Duke of Rutland died in 1857, and his successor was prepared to allow the Midland Railway to build a cut-and-cover tunnel at the back of Haddon Hall which was at the time practically derelict.

The Midland line to Manchester consequently went up the Wye Valley, through Monsal and Miller’s Dales on its way to Chinley.

And the original Rowsley station, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, was left at the dead end of an unbuilt main line, made redundant by a new Rowsley station a few hundred yards away.

The old building survived as the goods office for sidings known as ‘The Old Yard’, and was the very last rail facility to close in Rowsley in July 1968.

After the railway closed the Old Yard was occupied by a construction company, and in 1999 the old station became a feature of the Peak Village shopping outlet:  http://www.peakshoppingvillage.com.

The original MBM&MR track is now operated from Matlock to just short of Rowsley by PeakRail, with the ultimate intention of extending the heritage railway through Haddon to Bakewell and beyond.

End of the line: Hornsea

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Former Hornsea Railway Station

Former Hornsea Railway Station

It’s appropriate that one of the best preserved Victorian buildings in Hornsea is the former railway station of 1854 designed by Rawlins Gould of York, a former assistant to the North Eastern Railway’s architect, the better-known George Townsend Andrews.

Hornsea grew as a seaside resort entirely because of the construction of the Hull & Hornsea Railway, promoted by a Hull timber-merchant, Joseph Armytage Wade (1819-1896) and constructed between 1862 and 1864.

It was at Wade’s insistence that the line was extended from the planned terminus at Hornsea Mere as far as the sea front, increasing the cost of the whole project from £68,000 to £122,000.

Like the comparable line from Hull to Withernsea, this line stood no real chance of success as an independent branch railway, and was taken over by the North Eastern Railway in 1866.

Commuter traffic was significant:  times were adjusted to benefit businessmen working in Hull, and services gradually increased to the end of the nineteenth century, from seven weekday return trips and one on Sunday in 1870 to nine on weekdays and three on Sunday by 1890.

Day trippers filled the resort, particularly at bank holidays:  on Whit Monday 1890, two thousand excursion passengers were recorded.

Visitor censuses consistently indicated that the majority of visitors were from Hull and most of the rest from the West Riding.

The railway closed in 1964, exactly a hundred years after it opened, and the station, after a period of neglect, was redeveloped as housing in 1987.