Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Niagara by bus

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London Transport RM1102, operated by Double Deck Tours, Niagara Falls, Ontario (2001)

London Transport RM1102, operated by Double Deck Tours, Niagara Falls, Ontario (2001)

My explorations on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls were enlivened by the opportunity to travel by London Transport Routemaster bus:  http://www.doubledecktours.com.

The outside temperature in late July was pushing 100°F (37.8°C) and the nearest a Routemaster goes to air-conditioning is to open the top-deck quarter-drop windows and the rear emergency-exit window and hope for a through-draught.

The red double-deck London bus qualifies for the over-used expression “icon”.  Alongside the San Francisco cable-car and the trams of Melbourne and Hong Kong, it’s instantly recognisable  and – unlike rail-borne icons – easily exportable.

London ran heritage Routemasters running tourists across the West End, though they were removed from ordinary services in 2005, until 2020, when they were discontinued during the Covid pandemic.

It’s possible to ride on genuine London buses in many parts of the world:  my introduction to Christchurch, New Zealand, a few days before the 2011 earthquake, was on a Routemaster that took the steep and sharply curved Mount Pleasant Road without complaint:  https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=1228.

Apart from their nostalgia appeal, the Routemaster has the advantage of being an extremely robust, well-designed vehicle with extraordinary longevity, attributable to the maintenance programme which amounted to a full rebuild every five years at the London Transport works at Aldenham.

The Routemaster was an improvement on its predecessor, the RT.  It’s regrettable that when the traditional two-man-operated, open-platform Routemaster was superseded by off-the-shelf vehicles from commercial manufacturers, none of them have lasted so well.

Like the High Speed Train, the Routemaster stands as unbeatable British design that wasn’t directly followed up.

Nearly half of the 2,876 Routemasters built between 1954 and 1968 are still in existence, and there’s no difficulty in obtaining spares.  Indeed, Routemaster owners have an association to call on for assistance and rallies can attract over a hundred vehicles from far and wide:  http://routemaster.org.uk/pages/diamondjubilee.

Niagara Falls stories: “Red” Hill and the runaway scow

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Niagara River scow

Niagara River scow

From the Canadian side of the Niagara River, some distance above the Horseshoe Falls, you can see what looks like a rusty iron skip sitting in the middle of the rapids.

It’s actually a scow, a river barge intended to be towed by a powered vessel.  This one was being towed by a tug, the Hassayampa, when it came adrift on the afternoon of August 6th 1918, carrying two deckhands, Gustave Loftberg (51) and Frank Harris (53), helplessly towards the falls until it ran aground on the shallow rocks, where it remains to this day.

Crowds gathered to observe their predicament, but rescuing them by boat was impossible because of the current and the danger of the falls downstream.

It took until nightfall to secure a rope to rescue the men.  Searchlights were installed and a breeches buoy attached but became entangled.  At 3.00am William “Red” Hill Snr, a local Canadian daredevil with a formidable record of lifesaving around the Falls, traversed the rope hand over hand but was unable to disentangle the buoy until daylight.

It took until 10.00am on August 7th to bring Loftberg and Harris, shocked, hungry and suffering from exposure, back to the Canadian bank:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nxeznO5D4s.

“Red” Hill was awarded the Carnegie Life Saving Medal for his rescue.

By the time of his death aged 54 in 1942, he was credited with saving 28 people, including Loftberg and Harris, in and around the Niagara River.

Update:  In December 2021, after a heavy storm, the scow flipped over and moved fifty metres nearer to the Falls:  101-year-old ship dislodged above Niagara Falls – BBC News.

Niagara Falls stories: Schoellkopf Power Station

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Schoellkopf Power Station ruins, Niagara Falls, New York State, USA

Schoellkopf Power Station ruins, Niagara Falls, New York State, USA

I once went to Niagara Falls, to see the waterfalls, as you do.  I stayed on the USA side, in what the cab-driver described as “the best b&b in town”:  http://www.travelassist.com/reg/ny33-71.html.

Over a couple of days I saw and photographed the Falls from all angles, including the Maid of the Mist and Cave of the Winds.

I spent an afternoon in Canada, because the Canadians have all the best views, while the Americans have all the best close-up vantage points.

One oddity intrigued me on the bus-ride along the Canadian side – a heap of rubble and vestiges of an industrial site on cliffs that form the opposite bank.

I was told that this was the site of the Schoellkopf Power Station, which collapsed in a spectacular manner in 1956.

This was the creation of Jacob F Schoellkopf (1819-1899), the first person to harness the power of Niagara Falls to generate electricity.

He was a remarkable entrepreneur, who built his fortune first in tanneries and later in flour-milling.

He bought the previously unsuccessful Niagara Falls Canal in 1877 and opened the first of a succession of hydro-electric power stations, No 1, in 1881.  No 2 followed in 1891, and after his death Nos 3A and 3B opened in 1904, and No 3C in 1921-4.

Schoellkopf looked for a more efficient way of illuminating the Falls at night than the ineffective calcium flares that had been used since 1860.  In 1881 he made a contract with Charles F Brush (1849-1929) of Euclid, Ohio, to harness sixteen carbon arc lights to his hydraulic power company’s generators.

The Schoellkopf generating stations worked efficiently, but there was a fatal weakness in the construction of No 2 station, which was built immediately in front of its predecessor.

Between the two structures water slowly penetrated until on the morning of June 7th 1956 leaks became evident and increased despite the efforts of forty labourers to pile sandbags against the retaining wall.

At 5.00pm a loud rumble was immediately followed by the collapse of Power Stations 2, 3B and 3C – two-thirds of the entire plant – into the Niagara River, taking out six huge generators and throwing debris as far as the Canadian bank, cutting 400,000 kilowatts of power from the grid.

Only one worker, Richard Draper of Lewiston, was killed.  His companions, Louis Bernstein and Robert Chapman, were picked up by a Canadian Maid of the Mist boat.  All the others escaped without injury.

The destroyed power-stations were replaced by what became the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, named after the controversial New York city planner Robert Moses (1888-1981), generating 2,525 megawatts.

The St Pancras clock

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British Horological Institute Museum, Upton Hall, Nottinghamshire: St Pancras Station clock hands

British Horological Institute Museum, Upton Hall, Nottinghamshire: St Pancras Station clock hands

The clock at St Pancras Station has long been a rendezvous for couples to meet, a tradition now symbolised by Paul Day’s magnificently kitsch thirty-foot-high sculpture The Meeting Place (2007).  (The frieze below the huge figures, added in 2008, is actually much more interesting.)

The clock itself is not original.

The original eighteen-foot-diameter dial was sold to an American collector in the 1970s for £250,000, but during the removal fell to the concourse and smashed to pieces.

Mr Roland Hoggard, a railwayman and clock enthusiast, paid £25 for the pieces, including the hands and clock mechanism, and took it all back to his home village of Thurgaton in Nottinghamshire.

There he reconstructed the dial on the side of his barn and powered the hands by the original motion.

When the station was refurbished as the permanent terminus for Eurostar, the clockmakers Dent & Co took moulds and samples and reproduced the dial and hands exactly, with new Swithland slate numerals and much 23-carat gold leaf.

In 2015 the artist Cornelia Parker devised a second, black dial to hang in front of the not-original clock-face.  The installation was entitled ‘One More Time’  [https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/cornelia-parker-st-pancras-international].

When Mr Hoggard died in 2013 at the age of 96 he bequeathed the clock to the British Horological Institute museum, five miles away from Thurgaton at Upton Hall, where for the moment the hands sit incongruously on top of a doorcase.

The BHI museum conservators are restoring the clock mechanism.  Where they’ll find space to put the dial remains to be seen.

The BHI Museum at Upton Hall is open on a limited basis: http://bhi.co.uk/museum/museum-events. 

Home of clocks

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Upton Hall, Nottinghamshire

Upton Hall, Nottinghamshire

Upton Hall, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, has been the home of the British Horological Institute’s museum collection of timepieces of all shapes and sizes since the early 1970s, but it has only recently opened to the public:  http://bhi.co.uk/museum/museum-events.

It’s a fascinating place, currently open only on Fridays and for occasional special events, though the adjacent Clock House Café & Tea Room in the grounds is open seven days a week and well worth a visit:  http://clockhousecafe.co.uk/about.

Upton was an ecclesiastical estate, attached to Southwell Minster, in the Middle Ages, and there was a hall in the village from the 1580s at least.

The Hall itself is an attractively quirky building, redesigned by the architect William John Donthorn (1799-1859) for the banker Thomas Wright (1773-1845).  The garden front, with its tetrastyle portico, is more impressive than the austere entrance, and the splendid central staircase hall is top-lit by a leaded dome.

A later owner, the Newark brewer John Warwick, extended the house, adding the west wing containing a ballroom, a billiard room and a suite of six bedrooms with dressing rooms, after he bought it in 1895.

It was purchased in 1936 by Sir Albert Ball, the son of a trading plumber who had risen to wealth as an estate agent and land dealer and became Lord Mayor of Nottingham.  He sold it on to the Catholic order of the Fathers of the Holy Ghost for use as a novitiate house for trainee priests.

A post-war vicar, Rev Frank West, describes how, when he took over, one of the churchwardens declared, “over the road is The Holy Ghost, but you won’t get much help from that.”  (In fact, Frank West found, social relations were entirely amicable:  each group of adherents supported the other’s annual fête.)

Frank West arrived in the village just in time to be isolated by the vicious winter of 1947.  By chance he discovered a cache of seventeenth-century parish papers, and his researches, carried out while confined to his new vicarage by the weather, produced one of the best-written village histories in the language:  Rude Forefathers:  Upton-by-Southwell, 1600-1660 (1949;  Cromwell Press 1989).

George Lillywhite, A Tickle to Leg:  the history of Upton-by-Southwell and its cricketers, 1855-1901 (Morley’s 1996) follows in the same tradition, turning the quest for sporting archives into a portrait of a village community.

Upton’s most famous son appears to be Professor James Tennant (1808-1881), the mineralogist who was responsible for the cutting of the Koh-i-nor diamond.

Most people drive through Upton village on the A612 in not much more than a minute without any idea of its quiet history.

It’s a pity to miss the Clock House Café and the Hall full of clocks, and I hope that increased footfall will encourage the BHI to open their Museum more often.

Exploring Melbourne – the Karachi to Melbourne tram

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Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

Melbourne Tram Museum, Hawthorn, Victoria: tram no 81, aka Karachi W11

As you would expect of a tram city, there is a Melbourne Tram Museum, in the former Hawthorn tram depot, not far from Boroondara Cemetery.

The Museum has an encyclopaedic collection of vehicles dating right back to the cable-tramway (which began in 1885 and finally expired as late as 1940), parked in densely packed lines which make them difficult to see and sometimes impossible to photograph.

Its saving grace is that visitors have the run of all the vehicles.  This was apparent as I walked through the doors by the cacophony of tram bells.  Melbourne Tram Museum is the antithesis of places like Crich or Prague where the interiors of vehicles are mostly treated as shrines unless you’re actually riding on them.

I particularly enjoyed the “Karachi W11” tram – a superannuated 1970s vehicle that was decorated to within an inch of its life by a team of Pakistani artists for the Commonwealth Games of 2006.  It’s great fun, done up like a Karachi minibus with flashing lights, tassels and all manner of glitter and carrying the number of a Karachi bus-route.

Originally fleet-number 81, dating from 1977, it was the first of the Z1 class, one of the generation of Melbourne trams that began to replace the long-lived W class which are still the emblem of the city’s transport.

The Karachi tram’s side-panels carry the message “Love is Life” in English and Urdu, and inside are invocations in both languages to “Respect your elders” and “Travel in silence”.

The newly decorated tram ran on the City Circle for the duration of the Games, March 14th-26th 2006, and again on Friday evenings during the summer of 2006-7 as part of the City of Melbourne Living Arts Program.

Otherwise it remained in store until it was transferred to the Museum in June 2015.

By far the most amusing tram in the city, it deserves an occasional outing as an alternative to the celebrated Colonial Tramcar Restaurant.

Because the Museum is staffed by volunteers it’s only accessible on open days, and it’s well worth a visit:  http://www.hawthorntramdepot.org.au.

Exploring Victoria – Puffing Billy Railway

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Puffing Billy Railway, Victoria, Australia: Monbulk Creek viaduct

Puffing Billy Railway, Victoria, Australia: Monbulk Creek viaduct

The rail-traveller’s approach to the Puffing Billy Railway is by suburban electric train from the City Loop eastwards to Belgrave.

Though the route is a conventional trip through the Melbourne suburbs, it’s noticeable that further out the track has been expensively lowered into a steep-sided cutting to eliminate dangerous at-grade road crossings.

Towards the end of the journey, the line changes character.  After Upper Ferntree Gulley the broad-gauge electric multiple unit squeezes itself on to a rural single line with passing loops until it reaches its terminus at Belgrave.

The reason for this is that when the 1889 line as far as Upper Ferntree Gulley was extended ten years later it was built as one of four experimental 2ft-6in gauge branch lines, an extreme expression of Victorian Railways’ commitment to provide rail service even to remote communities in the days before motorised road transport.

Even though none of these narrow-gauge lines ever made a profit, the line from Upper Ferntree Gulley to the far terminus at Gembrook operated until a landslip in 1953 gave VR an excuse to close it.

The manifest popularity of the numerous “farewell” specials run as far as Belgrave motivated enthusiasts to raise the possibility of running it as a volunteer-operated heritage railway, the Puffing Billy Railway, named after the local nickname for the narrow-gauge trains.

Though VR management was initially sceptical, the scheme went ahead, with the narrow-gauge trackbed from Upper Ferntree Gulley to Belgrave converted to broad gauge and electrified.

Belgrave reopened as a suburban station in 1962, the same year that the Puffing Billy Railway opened its service as far as Menzies Creek, extending it to Emerald (1965), Lakeside (1975) and to the original terminus at Gembrook in 1998, a total journey of fifteen miles.

The result is an absolute delight for tourists as well as enthusiasts.  The clearances are such that passengers are encouraged to dangle their legs out of the train windows.  The route passes through beautiful countryside and crosses two spectacular timber viaducts at Monbulk Creek and Cockatoo Creek.

The railway’s preservation credentials are impressive.  It possesses every surviving VR narrow-gauge locomotive, all but one of which are operable, as well as one magnificent G-class Garratt locomotive which is capable of hauling eighteen-coach trains.

Trains run every day of the year except Christmas Day, with a core group of paid staff alongside a welcoming, cheerful team of volunteers.

The Puffing Billy Railway has now run for longer as a heritage line than it did as part of a main-line network.  It dates back to the time when enthusiasts first began to believe they could run a railway, and rail professionals learned to trust them.

As such it stands alongside Britain’s narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway (reopened 1951) [http://www.talyllyn.co.uk] and standard-gauge Bluebell Railway (reopened 1960) [http://www.bluebell-railway.com] demonstrating that committed, hard-headed amateurs can make heritage rail a practical success.

Perhaps the ultimate accolade is a proposal for Victorian Railways to restore an original broad-gauge Tait electric multiple-unit set to operate a complementary service between Flinders Street and Belgrave in conjunction with the Puffing Billy trains:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tait_(train)#/media/File:TaitNewportWorkshops.jpg.

The spire and the minaret

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Trinity Methodist Church and the Jamia Mosque Ghausia, Firvale, Sheffield

Trinity Methodist Church and the Jamia Mosque Ghausia, Firvale, Sheffield

The multicultural, multi-faith nature of the local community, depicted in the Channel 4 documentary Keeping up with the Khans (2016) [http://www.channel4.com/programmes/keeping-up-with-the-khans], has a remarkable architectural expression in the buildings of Trinity Methodist Church, Firvale, Sheffield, which has closed because its congregation felt they could no longer maintain their large, listed building:  http://www.thestar.co.uk/our-towns-and-cities/sheffield/a-120-year-old-sheffield-church-to-close-due-to-cost-of-upkeep-1-8561680.

The church was built in 1899, designed by the Derby architect John Wills (1846-1906), a prolific builder of nonconformist churches and chapels.  The Gothic design is remarkably church-like, with a chancel, an altar and a tall spire that dominates the narrow fork of the junction between Firth Park Road and Owler Lane.

This High-Church Methodist layout, unusual in north Sheffield, is more often found in the affluent south-western suburbs.

The interior, split to provide meeting rooms in 1979-81, still retains its alabaster pulpit and font, and a three-manual Wilcox organ.

The adjacent Sunday School, added in 1907, was sold in 1976 and has become the Jamia Mosque Ghausia, carefully extended with a domed minaret that echoes the Gothic spire at the other end of the complex.

The church itself was put up for sale, with a guide price of £375,000, early in 2017 and was subsequently adapted as an extension to the mosque complex.

Christians and Muslims remain neighbours in the heart of Firvale, however, because the Anglican parish church of St Cuthbert continues its work, with a well-designed community centre leading from the north aisle, opened in 2014:  http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/community-boost-from-new-sheffield-church-1-6698115.

St Cuthbert’s is a building of quality, dating shortly after the opening of Trinity Methodist Church.  It was built 1901-5, designed by John Dodsley Webster (d 1913) whose many Sheffield buildings included the recently demolished Jessop Hospital for Women.

The diminutive tower of 1959 is an unfortunate addition.  However, the church contains fine stained glass by Archibald Davis (1877-1953) of the Bromsgrove Guild, including a particularly beautiful war-memorial east window depicting the Resurrection and the Ascension.

Whatever happens to the Trinity Methodist Church buildings, the Christians and the Muslims will continue to be neighbours and no doubt will work together for the good of the local community.

St Cuthbert's Church, Firvale, Sheffield: east window

St Cuthbert’s Church, Firvale, Sheffield: east window

Ding-dings

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Hong Kong Tramway: tourist tram 68 & 139

Hong Kong Tramway: tourist tram 68 & 139

Like San Francisco and Melbourne, Hong Kong has its own inimitable street-transport experience, the British-style four-wheel double-deck trams that the locals call “ding-dings”.  (There was a public outcry in 2000 when the bells were briefly replaced by a beeper.)

The tramway dates back to 1904, when a fleet of British-built single-deck electric trams began running between Kennedy Town and Causeway Bay.

Double-deckers, originally with open tops, arrived in 1912.

The route was later extended eastwards to Shau Kei Wan, eight miles from Kennedy Town, and in a loop round the Happy Valley racecourse.

Though the trams duck inland in places, the main line largely follows the shore line of the early 1900s.

The system was restored after the Second World War and while street tramways in Britain went into steep decline Hong Kong’s double-deckers proved invaluable as the colony’s population expanded in the 1950s.

The main line was double-tracked in 1949, and the tramway began to build its own cars in the traditional pattern, double-ended, fully enclosed, with four-wheel trucks and British electrical equipment, taking power by trolley poles.

Single-deck trailers were introduced in 1964, and when they disappeared in the early 1980s Hong Kong became the only tram-system in the world exclusively using double-deckers.

There are two teak-framed private-hire trams of antique appearance, convincing to the average tourist [Hong Kong Sightseeing Tram Tour – TramOramic Tour (hktramways.com)] though in fact they’re of no great age: no 28, Albert, dates from 1985 and 128, Victoria, was built in 1987.  They were joined by a open-balcony tour tram, 68, in 2016.

Two other trams remain unmodernised:  50 is a static exhibit in the Hong Kong Museum of History, and 120 continues to operate with its teak and rattan seating.

Travelling on a Hong Kong tram feels like a time-warp:  much more than any of the heritage tramways in Britain, this is real transportation serving ordinary workaday passengers going about their daily routine.  For tourists, moreover, the trams provide a grandstand view of shops and shoppers for miles.

Since 1976 passengers have boarded at the rear of the car through a turnstile and alighted at the front, paying their fares beside the driver.  All termini are balloon-loops, and trams are driven from one cab rather than two.

The appearance of the trams seems constant, though nowadays enlivened by all-over advertising, yet they have in fact been subtly modernised:  the heavy British controllers have been replaced by electronic controls and the seating is more comfortable.

A single flat-rate adult fare works out at around 23p in sterling:  https://www.hktramways.com/en/schedules-fares.

It’s even cheaper than the Star Ferry.

Star Ferry

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'Northern Star', Hong Kong Star Ferry

‘Northern Star’, Hong Kong Star Ferry

Though it only takes a matter of seven or eight minutes, Hong Kong’s Star Ferry is one of the most memorable ferry-trips anywhere in the world.

The channel between mainland Kowloon and Hong Kong Island is perhaps a kilometre – rather less, for instance, than the distance between Liverpool’s Pier Head and the Wirral.

The Star Ferry was started by an Indian entrepreneur, Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala, who arrived in Hong Kong as a stowaway in 1852, traded opium and became a hotelier.

His habit of naming vessels after stars is attributed to his regard for Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889) –

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea…

He named his company Star Ferry in 1898, just before he sold it to the merchant combine Jardine Matheson & Co and retired to India.

The vessels are double-ended, with two sets of bows to facilitate fast turnarounds.  The oldest still in service, Radiant Star and Celestial Star, date from 1956:  all but the two newest were built by the local Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co.

Until 1972, when the first cross-harbour road-tunnel opened, the ferry was the only practical means of travelling between Kowloon and Hong Kong Central.

Now there are three road and three MTR subway tunnels, and using the ferry is a deliberate choice rather than a necessity.

Though they carry far fewer passengers than in their heyday, the ferries remain popular with tourists.

A single adult trip costs roughly 25p, which is the second cheapest travel experience in Hong Kong:  http://www.starferry.com.hk/en/service.

Day or night, it’s a superb way to see the spectacular skyline with its array of skyscrapers backed by The Peak.