Monthly Archives: February 2025

Exploring Turin:  Superga

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Sassi-Superga Tramway. Turin, Italy
Basilica of Superga, Turin, Italy

The Sassi-Superga Tramway is a rack railway that climbs two thousand feet to a magnificent view of Turin and the Po valley.  Though it operates as a railway it looks like and is called a tramway, to the extent that it has a Turin route-number, 79.

It was built in 1884, powered by cables, and after an accident where the emergency stop fortunately worked perfectly it was rebuilt as a conventional rack railway powered by third-rail electricity in 1935. 

It uses the unusual Italian gauge of 4ft 8⅞in (1,445mm).  This weirdness arises from 1879 legislation which defined railway-track gauges by measuring them from the centre rather than the inside of the rail.  Italian main-line railways have quietly adapted to the worldwide standard gauge of 4ft 8½in (1,435mm), and apart from a solitary funicular, the only other examples of Italian gauge in the world are the tramways of Milan, Naples, Rome and Turin – and the Madrid metro.  There is also an Italian narrow gauge of 3ft 1¹⁄₁₆in (950mm).

The depot yard has no rack track, and a steeple-cab electric locomotive shunts the rack-equipped rolling stock using overhead caternary to the beginning of the rack at the entrance.  Passenger trains are operated, for obvious safety reasons, with the power car propelling one or two trailers, so that in an emergency the brake-power is where it should be.  The loco conveys the cable trams to the Turin street tracks when they need workshop attention.

At the Sassi station there’s a beautifully preserved horse streetcar (no: 197, dating from 1890) in a tiny museum, and outside on a spare platform an early streetcar (no: 209 of 1911).

The trip takes eighteen minutes, mainly through a verdant nature reserve with occasional views of opulent houses with splendid but hilly gardens.  By the time the tram is beyond the midway passing loop you can look straight out of the opposite window at the sky with no sign of the horizon below.

The upper terminus is modern and comfortable:  its café makes the most of the view and it’s pleasant to sit there until the next tram leaves in an hour.

There is a further treat, though, a short, stiff climb above the station.  The Basilica of Superga is a Baroque church, built 1717-31 by Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666-1732), later King of Savoy and latterly Sardinia, in fulfilment of a vow he made in the turmoil of the Siege of Turin in 1706.  The Chapel of the Vow, to the left of the sanctuary, is kept as a place of silent contemplation and, filled with respectful Catholics, has a distinctive atmosphere of veneration, like the side chapel of the Holy Shroud in the Duomo.

The Basilica is the site of Italy’s great football tragedy, where the entire Grande Torino football team were killed when their plane, returning from a friendly match in Lisbon, crashed into the retaining wall at the back of the church, on May 4th 1949.

Eighteen players died, together with three members of the coaching team, three club officials, three journalists and the flight crew of four – thirty-one in all.  There were no survivors.

The effect on the world of Italian football and the city of Turin was beyond intense.  Wikipedia describes the aftermath of the tragedy:

At the request of rival teams, Torino were proclaimed winners of the 1948–49 Serie A season on 6 May 1949, and the opponents, as well as Torino, fielded their youth teams in the four remaining games.  On the day of the funeral, half a million people took to the streets of Turin to give a final farewell to the players.  The following season, the other top Italian teams were asked to donate a player to Torino.  The shock of the crash was such that the following year, the Italy national team chose to travel to the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil by ship: Superga air disaster – Wikipedia.

As in subsequent football tragedies, such as Munich (1958), Ibrox (1971), Bradford (1985) and Hillsborough (1989), the emotional toll is remembered by millions every year.

Loxley Chapel Cemetery

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Loxley Chapel Cemetery, South Yorkshire

I’ve never understood why people claim that Sheffield is, like Rome, built on seven hills.  There’s even an Italian restaurant in Hillsborough called Sette Colli:  Home – Sette Colli Restaurant, Italian Restaurant, Sheffield, S6.

In fact, the city is drained by five significant rivers – Don, Loxley, Rivelin, Porter and Sheaf.  That makes six hills, each of which early industry utilised to power water mills.

The Don, which flows to Doncaster, is joined by the Rother in Rotherham.

The Sheaf is said to give the city its name, which explains the sheaves of corn on the city’s coat of arms.

The Loxley, which flows eastwards from the Pennine foothills through Bradfield to join the River Rivelin at Malin Bridge and then the River Don at Owlerton, brought the waters released by the Dale Dike Dam disaster thundering through these villages in March 1864.

On the northern side of the Loxley valley, a chapel was constructed in 1787 at a cost of £1,000 by members of the congregation of St Nicholas’ Church, Bradfield, who resisted the dismissal of the minister, Rev A Benjamin Greaves.

This fine, dignified building looks out above the road to Bradfield.  Practically square in plan, it’s distinguished by its elegant Venetian windows.  It could accommodate up to a thousand people and is surrounded by an extensive burial ground.

By 1798, after Rev Greaves had moved on, the building was leased to Dissenters and when they bought it for £315 it became Loxley Independent Church and, later, Loxley Congregational Church.

Through the nineteenth century the chapel and its surroundings were repeatedly improved – a schoolroom and minister’s house in 1855, the burial ground extended in 1875, and the chapel restored in 1890-91 – and in the twentieth century, with a depleted congregation, it continued to act as a focal point for the widespread farming community.  In 1972 it was renamed Loxley United Reformed Church.

By 1985, when it was listed Grade II* [LOXLEY UNITED REFORMED CHURCH, Bradfield – 1314565 | Historic England] indicating its historical and architectural importance, it was also placed on the Buildings At Risk Register.  After storm damage in 1989 it was extensively repaired and reopened in 1990, but two years later services ceased, though burials continued in the cemetery, and in 1996 the United Reformed Church sold the chapel and the cemetery to a private developer, now Ali Property Development.

The chapel continued to deteriorate until on August 17th 2016 it caught fire.  The fire brigade had difficulty putting three tenders within reach, and the roof and interior was entirely destroyed, leaving only the outside walls which remain fenced off and abandoned.

Images from February 2015 show what the interior looked like before it was burnt out:  Report – – Loxley Methodist Church, Sheffield – March 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk. (Despite the URL, it was never a Methodist church.)

The Friends of Loxley Cemetery was founded in 2019 to maintain the graveyard, safeguard the ruined chapel and take responsibility for the congregation’s records.  They’ve worked hard to clear the badly overgrown burial ground and reveal a remarkable collection of monuments and gravestones.  The back page of the Friends’ publicity leaflet shows the impact they’ve had on the site:  folc-publicity-leaflet-dec-202 (e-voice.org.uk).

At least twenty-two people who perished in the Great Sheffield Flood are buried at Loxley, and there are fourteen war burials – military graves from both World Wars and that of an air-raid warden killed in the Sheffield Blitz.

There are also two memorials to victims of the respective tragedies of the Titanic (1912) and the Lusitania (1915).

A bird’s eye view of Loxley Cemetery is available at Loxley Chapel and Cemetery filmed by drone in February 2023 – YouTube.

The Friends welcome visitors and volunteer helpers:  News Events – Friends of Loxley Cemetery (e-voice.org.uk).

The Sounding Arch

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Great Western Railway: Maidenhead Railway Bridge, Berkshire/Buckinghamshire

While Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s pioneering Wharncliffe Viaduct was under construction in the early stages of building the Great Western Railway from 1836, he was simultaneously engaged on a more audacious project, the Maidenhead Viaduct, where the line needed to cross the River Thames.

The Thames Navigation Commissioners were adamant that the river channel and both towpaths must not be obstructed, yet Brunel was determined to restrict the ruling gradient of the railway to 1 in 1,320 (0.076%). 

He located the crossing to take advantage of a midstream island, Bucks Ait, that could accommodate a bridge pier, and designed two brickwork spans, each 128 feet long, that rose only 24 feet in height.  The arches remain the flattest brick spans ever constructed.

The GWR directors lacked Brunel’s confidence in his design, especially after the contractor, William Chadwick, lowered the centring before the mortar had fully set, and the lower courses of the eastern arch dropped half an inch. 

Chadwick took responsibility and reinstated the brickwork, but Brunel was ordered to leave the centring in place when trains began to cross the bridge in July 1839.

His response was to quietly lower the timberwork a few inches, so that arches were self-supporting, while insisting that they remain in situ over the coming winter.  Brunel’s biographer, L T C Rolt, wryly observes, “The suspicion that this was due not so much to excessive caution as to an impish sense of humour is hard to resist.”

Indeed, when an autumn storm destroyed the centring and the bridge remained firm, Brunel’s critics were silenced.

The artist J M W Turner depicted the Maidenhead Viaduct in his painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ (1844), the first time a railway train had been portrayed in a sophisticated work of art.

The Maidenhead Viaduct remains almost exactly as it was built, except that it was widened in 1877 by Sir John Fowler, who took great trouble to preserve the proportions of Brunel’s design, though he used darker Cattybrook brick from Gloucestershire.  When the broad-gauge tracks were removed in 1892 the line was quadrupled. 

Similar care to preserve the beauty of Brunel’s engineering was taken when the line was electrified in 2017.

Oddly, when the viaduct was listed in 1950 only the western arch was designated Grade II*;  the eastern arch was added to the designation in 1985.  The entire bridge was upgraded to Grade I in 2012.

The name “The Sounding Arch” arose because of the spectacular echo.  If you stand underneath the arch on the Taplow towpath and clap, you may be rewarded with six or more echoes.  People on TripAdvisor complain that there isn’t an echo.  People complaining on TripAdvisor is not uncommon.