Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Paddle-steamer for sale

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PS Lincoln Castle, beached at Hessle (1984)

PS Lincoln Castle, beached at Hessle (1987)

Two of the three of the pre-war paddle-steamers built for the London & North Eastern Railway’s Humber ferry have survived:  the fate of the third, Lincoln Castle, is a particularly sad story.

The first two, Wingfield Castle and Tattershall Castle (both built in 1934), each have safe harbours.  Wingfield Castle is moored at Jackson Dock as part of the Museum of Hartlepool [http://www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/attractions/wingfieldcastle.asp]; Tattershall Castle, though structurally altered, continues to earn her living as a pub-restaurant moored on the Thames Embankment in central London.

Lincoln Castle, however, has had a more chequered career.  Intended as a development of the two 1934 vessels, she was built by A & J Inglis on the Clyde in 1940.  The Heritage Trail website [http://www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/maritime/lincoln%20castle.htm] tells of the difficulty of moving her from the Clyde to the Humber under the twin threats of bombardment and U-boat operations to begin work in 1941.

The last coal-fired paddle-steamer in regular public service, Lincoln Castle was withdrawn from service in 1978 when the boilers were no longer safe.  She was beached at Hessle in the shadow of the Humber Bridge where she served as a pub from 1981 to 1987.  Then she was towed across the river to Immingham, refitted and taken, not without difficulty, to Grimsby’s Alexandra Dock where she opened as a pub-restaurant in 1989 alongside the Fishing Heritage Centre building and the trawler Ross Tiger [see http://www.nelincs.gov.uk/art-culture-and-leisure/museums-and-galleries/fishing-heritage-centre and http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/days-out-gone-fishing-in-grimsby-642392.html].

The Lincoln Castle pub closed in 2006 for renovations and because of concerns about the condition of the hull she was beached in a corner of the dock.  In 2010 she was put up for sale, with the threat that without a buyer she would have to be broken up. Between them, private sponsors, the North East Lincolnshire Council and the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society [http://www.heritagesteamers.co.uk/index.html] were unable to find a practical solution to the difficulty of preserving a significant example of British maritime history that needed a great deal of expensive work simply to keep her afloat.

The future of the Lincoln Castle rested on a knife-edge:  http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.gaytor1/index.html, http://www.paddleducks.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=2214.0, and
http://paddlesteamers.awardspace.com/LincolnCastle.htm.

In the end it was dismantled, and some of the parts rescued for possible reconstruction:  http://web.archive.org/web/20110707201606/http://paddlesteamers.awardspace.com/LincolnCastle.htm.

Images of the Lincoln Castle and her sister ships can be found at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.enefer/newholland/newhollandferries.htm.

Buxworth or Bugsworth?

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Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

The little village of Buxworth, just to the north of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, is a highly significant historic site.  Here the wagons of the Peak Forest Tramroad, which was completed in 1800 and still in use after the First World War, tipped their limestone into kilns and narrow boats for transportation down the Peak Forest Canal to Manchester and beyond.

The tramroad is an example of the principle that “if it works, don’t fix it”:  it used flanged rails rather than flanged wheels, with loaded wagons descending by gravity and empties returned by horse-power, and a braking system that consisted of sticking a metal pole into the spokes of the wheels.  When the iron rails wore out in the 1860s, the railway company that owned it simply fabricated new steel rails to an eighteenth-century design.

The tramroad was ripped up in the 1920s, though the stone blocks that supported the rails are still found in great numbers.  The canal went out of use, leaked and silted up, so that when I first went to Buxworth in the early 1970s the basin was a barely recognisable jungle.

The proposal to build a Whaley Bridge and Buxworth by-pass would have ploughed straight through the middle of it, until the Inland Waterways Protection Society [IWPS – http://www.brocross.com/iwps] successfully argued for it to be designated an Ancient Monument in 1977 and the by-pass alignment was moved to the south where it was eventually built.

The basin is intact and now beautifully preserved, entirely because the volunteers of the IWPS contributed time, physical labour and expertise, and begged, borrowed and salvaged materials to reveal and restore the complex, intriguing layout of a location that was a busy, dirty, money-making industrial site until a little more than a hundred years ago.

Now it offers peaceful, attractive moorings for canal boats, and on the day the Manager of the site, Ian Edgar, took my Waterways & Railways across the Derbyshire Peak group round, schoolkids were learning to canoe in one of the basins.

At the head of the basin is the Navigation Inn [http://www.navigationinn.co.uk/index.php?option=home], once run by Pat Phoenix, the actress who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, and now operated by Jan & Roger, who provide excellent beer and anything from a fried breakfast to an à la carte meal in congenial pub surroundings.  Jan tells me that she’s rearranging the canal memorabilia that came with the pub, so that you can read the walls coherently, one room after another.

Buxworth Basin is well worth a look, and if you talk to Ian Edgar, call it Bugsworth, as they did in the eighteenth century.  If you talk to your sat-nav, it’s Buxworth.

Walking the Manx Northern Railway

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Manx Northern Railway between St Germain's and Kirk Michael

Manx Northern Railway between St Germain’s and Kirk Michael, Isle of Man

If it’s not possible to ride a railway line – because someone removed the track – the best way to understand it is to walk it.  When the Manx railway-system was reduced to a single route in the 1970s, the Manx Government had the prescience to preserve much of the disused trackbed as footpaths.

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John and I walked the stretch of the former Manx Northern Railway from St Germain’s (where the station is now beautifully restored as a house) to Kirk Michael (where the railway station is now the fire station).

The Manx Northern was built to take mineral traffic from the Foxdale mines directly to Ramsey harbour, using the only route possible for steam locomotives round the west side of the island.  When the Foxdale mines eventually failed, the MNR became part of the Isle of Man Railway.  Meanwhile, passengers between Douglas and Ramsey had gained a more direct route when the Manx Electric Railway was built along the precipitous east coast of the island.

The Manx Northern route is spectacular.  Walking up to the summit at Ballaquine and down to Kirk Michael is not strenuous, but the gradients are palpable.  The ivy-covered piers of the major viaducts, Glen Wyllin and Glen Mooar, remain without the lattice deck that carried trains:  you feel the height involved while crossing from one abutment to the other by steep paths and flights of steps.

Travellers who are disinclined to walk the line can follow much of its course, and appreciate its spectacular views of the island’s west coast, on the Peel-Ramsey double-deck bus [routes 5 and 6], which is what John and I did – travelling in eight minutes the distance we’d walked in 2½ hours – when the pub in Kirk Michael proved unable to provide any kind of lunch.

Instead we went to the excellent Creek Inn in Peel [http://thecreekinn.co.uk/], where we were served by a star barman called Chris, and ate smoked salmon wrapped in asparagus and spicy chicken wraps with excellent beer and friendly service.

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.