Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Newark Air Museum

Leave a Reply
Newark Air Museum: English Electric Lightning T5 XS417

Newark Air Museum: English Electric Lightning T5 XS417

I know very little about aircraft.

I was brought up alert to steel wheels on steel rails.  I was taught to read, write and count by watching the trams go past the house in post-war Sheffield.  My dad took me trainspotting on Sunday mornings while my mum cooked lunch (which we called dinner).

I still think numbers look best in sans-serif, as they were on the front of most Sheffield trams and buses and on the cab-sides of British Railways locomotives.  And though roller-blind destination indicators are on their way out, if I see a driver scrolling to change his display I have to stand and watch the succession of place-names.

My mate Richard was brought up on rubber wheels – cars and motorbikes – and seems to have spent his childhood building model planes.

So when he suggested spending a couple of hours at the Newark Air Museum, just off the A1 in Nottinghamshire [http://www.newarkairmuseum.org/index.html], I didn’t expect to learn much.

In fact, it’s a rich, varied and highly professional museum, with excellent interpretation that’s informative for enthusiasts and at the same time intelligible to numpties like me.

We wandered through two vast display halls and a small-objects display hall, inspected a range of aircraft outside, and briefly looked at a collection of aero-engines (to appreciate which you presumably need an engineering degree).

I declined an offer to sit in the cockpit of a Jaguar, knowing that when Dick walked round the corner he’d jump at the chance.  He had at least a vague idea of what all the knobs and dials were for, whereas I’d be like the guy at Crich who asked how you steer a tram.

The Museum runs a rich series of events, ranging from an Aeroboot sales day to a Cockpit-Fest.  There is a comprehensive education programme, particularly for primary schoolchildren, Cubs and Scouts, and Air Training Corps squadrons.

There’s a shop, billed as “the best specialist aviation outlet in the Midlands”, and a small, warm and welcoming café, which for the moment only goes as far as “legendary” toasties and paninis but will in due course branch out in a new building, thanks to ‘Project Panini’ [http://www.newarkairmuseum.org/newsItem.php?id=736].

The site, adjacent to the Newark and Nottinghamshire Agricultural Society showground, was formerly RAF Winthorpe, a Second World War base that operated from September 1940 until July 1959.

The aircrew who flew from there and didn’t come back are commemorated by a poignant memorial which incorporates part of a propeller hub of a MK III Short Stirling, EF186, which was based at RAF Winthorpe and crashed out of control at Breeder Hills near Grantham on December 4th 1944.

In essence, this rich collection of magnificent engineering commemorates the skill and the bravery of those who flew from airfields like this before, during and after the Second World War and their successors who continue to do so.

Great little Norfolk railway

Leave a Reply
Bure Valley Railway: Wroxham

Bure Valley Railway: Wroxham – locomotive no 6, Blickling Hall

An unexpected sight on the rail journey between Norwich, Cromer and Sheringham is the busy little station of the Bure Valley Railway at Wroxham.

It’s literally little because the Bure Valley trains run to the tiny gauge of fifteen inches.  The line follows the trackbed of the former East Norfolk Railway standard-gauge line to Aylsham, which is now the terminus.  Originally it extended past what is now a Tesco car-park to a junction at County School.

The scale of the Bure Valley trains allows for the full paraphernalia of main-line steam and diesel operation.  The Aylsham station has four platforms and a complicated track layout, and both termini have turntables:  indeed, the turning of the locomotive at Wroxham is a highlight of the journey.

Miniature it may be, but this is no toy railway.

Indeed, it operates boat trains which offer a return journey from Aylsham to Wroxham with a ninety-minute Broads cruise:  http://www.bvrw.co.uk/trains/boattrain.asp.

Three adults can sit comfortably side by side in the passenger coaches, some of which have electric heating for winter operation.

It’s a seriously attractive attraction.

Norfolk Orbital Railway

Leave a Reply
Wymondham Abbey Station, Mid-Norfolk Railway, Norfolk

Wymondham Abbey Station, Mid-Norfolk Railway, Norfolk

At present, the Mid-Norfolk Railway [http://www.mnr.org.uk] preserves an 11½-mile-long, unremarkable stretch of the former Great Eastern Railway between Wymondham and Dereham.  Though there is a physical connection to Network Rail at Wymondham, public services stop short at Wymondham Abbey.

As well as providing the usual tourism services of a heritage railway, the enterprising Mid-Norfolk line provides freight services through its connection to the national network, serves military traffic and provides testing facilities for the rail industry and training opportunities for the emergency services.

Most of its operations are diesel hauled, and there are regular appearances of guest steam locomotives.

Reaching this stage of development has been a considerable struggle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Norfolk_Railway] and future plans are ambitious and exciting.

The Mid-Norfolk Railway Trust owns a further six miles of track-bed northwards to County School Station (built for and named after a long-gone boarding school operated by Dr Barnardo’s from 1907 to 1953).

Linking this section to the existing line provides a springboard for a further lengthy extension to Fakenham.

And that’s not all.  The proposed Holt, Melton Constable & Fakenham Railway plans to reinstate continuous railway from Holt to Melton Constable, the core of the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway system, continuing on to the M&GNR main line to Fakenham, where it would ultimately connect with the extended Mid-Norfolk Railway on the former Great Eastern Railway.

This project involves several physical alterations to the historic route –

  • reinstating a rail link alongside the A148 by-pass into Holt
  • constructing a new Melton Constable station on a different site to the vanished original
  • realigning the route through Melton Constable to avoid reversal
  • avoiding the Pensthorpe wildfowl park which occupies the original alignment on the entry to Fakenham

The completed project, the Norfolk Orbital Railway [http://www.norfolk-orbital-railway.co.uk/index.html], would reintroduce rail transport to north-west Norfolk, and provide an 84-mile continuous loop incorporating the current rail-services between Wymondham, Norwich, Cromer and Sheringham.

A further project, the Whitwell & Reepham Railway Preservation Society Limited, based at Whitwell & Reepham station on the M&GNR Fakenham-Norwich line, has long-term [http://whitwellstation.com] plans to reinstate seven miles of track and to link with either the North Norfolk Railway or the Mid-Norfolk Railway.

 

Christmas in a T-Shirt: The Blue Train

Leave a Reply
The Blue Train, Kimberley, South Africa

The Blue Train, Kimberley, South Africa

The Blue Train, Kimberley, South Africa: passenger compartment interior

The Blue Train, Pretoria-Cape Town, South Africa: passenger compartment interior

Everyone deserves to be treated at least once in their lives as well as passengers are treated on South Africa’s Blue Train [http://www.bluetrain.co.za] which trundles the 990 miles between Pretoria and Cape Town at a leisurely pace in 27 hours.

From the moment passengers are ushered on to the platform and then the train by the train-captain, all they need to do is ask.

My butler was called Herbert.  He showed me the cabin, awash with armchairs and cushions, the marquetry panelling, the marble bathroom, the mobile phone to summon him at any time, the multiplicity of light-switches and lights, the TV zapper which also controlled the venetian blinds within the double-glazed window.  You can even tune the TV to the camera on the front of the locomotive, a quarter of a mile ahead, so you can see where you’re going.

When you have a bath on a train, the water slops up to your head or down to your feet every time you go round a bend.

Everything you could possibly need was there, if sometimes not where you’d expect to find it, and each time I ventured into the corridor Herbert was invisibly in and out tidying the pencils and replacing the mineral water bottle.

Everything, including the postcards and the postage, is on the house.  In the lounge car I asked the barman, a young man called Wesley, if people sometimes got out of control and he said, yes, it sometimes happened.

In the dining car Irene, my waitress, kept me stocked up with appropriate wines, tuning into my preference for cheese before dessert and proffering dessert wine at the appropriate moment.  For lunch I had venison;  for dinner ostrich.  There was also afternoon tea, and pots of tea and coffee delivered to the cabin by Herbert.

Before dinner I sat on a bar-stool watching the sunset and drinking white wine, and returned to the bar afterwards with an English couple I’d met in the observation car, and we mulled over brandies which Wesley had expertly warmed.  Very large double brandies.

When I eventually went back to my suite, transformed by Herbert into a bedroom, and opened the window-blinds, the sky was ablaze with stars as we crossed the Karoo desert.

For breakfast there was smoked-salmon omelette – and much, much else.

I was very fortunate to make the journey in 2000, when the Rand was falling through the floor.  In 2020 the single fare from Pretoria to Cape Town or vice versa is just over £1,000.  Seriously, there are far worse ways of spending that sort of money on a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Or perhaps twice in a lifetime.

Sapperton Tunnel

Leave a Reply
Sapperton Tunnel, Thames & Severn Canal, Gloucestershire: Coates Portal

Sapperton Tunnel, Thames & Severn Canal, Gloucestershire: Coates Portal

Sapperton Tunnel on the Thames & Severn Canal epitomises the canal-builder’s dilemma about crossing a watershed – whether to dig an expensive tunnel to save lockage, or to build locks that demand a constant and abundant source of water.

Sapperton Tunnel cost a great deal to build, and leaked like a sieve.

The engineer Josiah Clowes is thought to have worked on the 2,880-yard, nine-foot-wide Harecastle Tunnel on the Trent & Mersey Canal for James Brindley, and Sapperton Tunnel was longer, at 3,817 yards, and was built to broad-canal dimensions without a towpath.  At the time of construction it was the longest tunnel so far built.

Work began in the spring of 1784 and was completed in 1789:  the first boat went through on April 20th that year.  Defects in the structure led to a ten-week closure only a year after the opening.

The original surveyor of the Thames & Severn Canal, Robert Whitworth, had observed, on a frankly superficial inspection, that the summit level ran “over some bad Rocky Ground…worse than [he had] even seen any Canal cut thro’ for such a continued length”.

In fact, the line of the tunnel alternately passes through impermeable oolite and the unstable, permeable clay known as fuller’s earth:  http://www.cotswoldcanals.com/pages/locks-bridges-structures/sapperton-tunnel.php.

The geologist John Phillips (1800-1874), in his biography of his geologist uncle Memoirs of William Smith (1844), wrote scathingly about the fundamental weakness of the line:

Such canals…are like the buckets of the Danaids, and with the water goes the profit.  In vain the Thames, raised from its source by a mighty engine, is poured into such a thirsty canal;  the flood passes into the gaping rocks below, in spite of renewed puddling and continual repairs.

The last boat went through Sapperton Tunnel on May 11th 1911 and almost the entire canal was abandoned in 1927.

The Cotswolds Canal Trust has been working since 1975 to restore the entire length of the Thames & Severn Canal, and the reopening of Sapperton Tunnel forms part of the third and final phase of their project:  http://www.cotswoldcanals.net/tunnel.php.

It won’t be easy, as Ken Burgin’s inspection 2009 report indicates:  http://www.cotswoldcanals.net/downloads/CCT_Tunnel_Report_Trow_Spring_2009.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.

Puffing Billy

1 Reply
Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire: 46203 Princess Margaret Rose

Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire: 46203 Princess Margaret Rose

Billy Butlin (1899-1980) was as sharp as a tack.

South African-born, raised in Canada, he came to England with £5, of which he invested £4 in a stall at his uncle’s fair.  From this humble start as a showman he built his empire of holiday camps.

He was astute.  Fred Pontin once told him, “You’ve taught me everything I know about holiday camps.”  To which Butlin responded, “Maybe, but not everything I know.”

He had a pragmatic attitude to the finer things of life.  To furnish the chapels that he installed in each of his camps, he instructed his staff to source paintings – “religious, big, and not more than fifty quid”.

When British Railways were scrapping steam locomotives in the early 1960s, Billy Butlin bought eight as ornaments for his camps at Ayr, Minehead, Pwllheli and Skegness.

He saved four tank-engines (three LB&SCR Terriers and an L&SWR dock-tank) and four magnificent express locomotives from the LM&SR – all of which are now in serious preservation – purely so that kids could climb on them and be photographed in front of them.

Thanks to Billy Butlin we can still enjoy 6100 Royal Scot, 6203 Princess Margaret Rose and two of the huge ‘Princess Coronation’ class – 6229 Duchess of Hamilton, now in the National Railway Museum restored to its original streamlined shape, and 6233 Duchess of Sutherland, currently earning its keep pulling charter specials on the main lines.

6203 Princess Margaret Rose is one of the jewels in the crown of the Midland Railway Butterley [http://www.midlandrailway-butterley.co.uk/home], where the Princess Royal Class Trust [http://www.prclt.co.uk/index2.html] has its base.

Occasionally, when tour itineraries require it, Princess Margaret Rose is visited by its sister engine 6201 Princess Elizabeth, named after the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Then it is possible for the Trust to wheel out its two 21-inch-guage replicas of the two locomotives, which were also built for Butlin’s Camps, alongside.

Two locomotives, in two sizes – all side by side.  Unique, as far as I know.  All thanks to Billy Butlin.

Fork-lift heritage

Leave a Reply
National Fork Truck Heritage Centre, Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire

National Fork Truck Heritage Centre, Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire

Of all the topics I’ve come across in a lifetime of researching architectural and social history, the development of the fork-lift truck is singularly bereft of humour, entertainment or engaging personalities.

In the fork-lift world there’s nobody like Percy Shaw, who invented the retro-reflective road marker or “cat’s-eye” [http://designmuseum.org/design/percy-shaw].

Instead, there’s a simple story of complex machines that can shift and stack heavy loads without overbalancing – machines which we tend to take entirely for granted.

One of the few fork-lift history websites [http://www.ttt-services.co.uk/truck_history.htm] declares, “Everything we eat or wear, and everything in our home, including the materials to build the house itself, has at some stage been stored and handled by materials handling equipment.”

The National Forklift Truck Heritage Centre [http://www.nationalforktruckheritagecentre.org/index.html] preserves the heritage and the archives of these clever pieces of kit.

The Centre’s collection spans from the oldest fork-lift truck in existence, a Yale model of 1926, to examples from the end of the twentieth century.

Who would cross the road to see a collection of eighty-odd fork-lift trucks?  Anybody who’s ever driven one, for sure.  Engineers, and those with an appreciation of engineering, certainly.

In fact, ordinary tourists, families out for the weekend and railway enthusiasts find their way to the Centre because it’s part of the Midland Railway Butterley museum in Derbyshire:  http://www.midlandrailway-butterley.co.uk/home.

In addition, the rental that the Centre presumably pays to the Midland Railway Butterley helps to develop their hugely ambitious transport-museum campus.

It’s a win-win situation.  Uplifting, so to speak.

Utterly Butterley

2 Replies
Swanwick Junction, Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire

Swanwick Junction, Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire

First-time visitors to the Midland Railway Butterley, Derbyshire, the biggest and most comprehensive attempt to commemorate one of Britain’s finest pre-Grouping railway companies, might initially be underwhelmed by the presentation of the place.

Riding in a rag-tag collection of railway carriages with slow speeds, limited mileage and much standing in stations may not impress at first.

The full length of the line is 3½ miles, and you can’t get off at either end, but the main site at Swanwick Junction is extensive.

There are meticulously reconstructed station buildings in the classic Midland design at Butterley and Swanwick Junction, four Midland-pattern signal boxes and other structures including the tin church of St Saviour from Westhouses, Derbyshire.

There are actually several railways:  apart from the standard-gauge line there’s a narrow-gauge railway, a miniature railway and a garden railway.

In a succession of museum buildings there are locomotives, rolling stock, buses, stationary steam engines and the national collection of historic fork-lift trucks.

A notice in one of the museum buildings apologises for the dust – because “we are a working museum”.

That’s the key.

This is a hugely ambitious project, driven by a consortium of preservation groups, “dedicated to the glory of the Midland Railway”, according to the website strapline:  http://www.midlandrailway-butterley.co.uk/home.

The scale of the task is measured by the contrast between the finished preservation projects, such as the Midland Railway royal saloon and the only surviving Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway coach, and the desperately decayed relics waiting for attention.

Butterley reminds me of the Sydney Tramway Museum in New South Wales – another grand scheme to recreate a vanished and much celebrated transport system.

The Midland Railway project has been at Butterley now for forty years, and it might take another forty to accomplish the vision.  No doubt an influx of volunteers and repeated injections of cash would help, but the place is busy.

I spoke to a seasoned enthusiast on the train back to Butterley.  “There’s a lot here,” he said.  He thought he’d be on his way home by 2.30 and it was coming up to half past four.

That’s the short-term measure of success – and the encouragement to return.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 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 line that goes uphill to the sea

Leave a Reply
Groudle Glen Railway, Isle of Man

Groudle Glen Railway, Isle of Man

Many of the Manx glens remain open to the public, but one above all recaptures the atmosphere of its late-Victorian heyday because of the restoration by a team of ten volunteers of the Groudle Glen Railway.

Richard Maltby Broadbent, the owner of Bibaloe Farm, Onchan, built the Groudle Hotel, and opened Groudle Glen as a resort to coincide with the opening of the Manx Electric Railway in 1893.

He added to the glen’s amenities by opening a miniature railway in 1896 to carry visitors to see the imported Californian sea-lions at a zoo at Sea Lion Rocks.  The service became successful enough to justify supplementing the original locomotive, Sea Lion, with a companion, Polar Bear (1905).

After the First World War battery-electric locomotives were used for six years, but proved to be so unreliable that the original steam locomotives were overhauled and returned to service.

The Groudle Glen Railway reopened after the Second World War in 1950, but a landslip made the terminus inaccessible.  The line was abandoned in the late 1950s, briefly reopened in 1962, but was then closed and lifted.

In the 1980s it was rebuilt by the Isle of Man Steam Railway Supporters Association:  diesel-hauled trains as far as the Headland began running in May 1986, until Sea Lion, fully restored by BNFL Sellafield apprentices, was ready for service in October 1987.

The line was restored to Sea Lion Rocks in May 1992, and a tea-room with spectacular views now stands at the terminus.

The railway has gone from strength to strength in the past twenty years and is well worth seeking out:  http://www.ggr.org.uk.

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.

Climbing the snow mountain

1 Reply
Snaefell Mountain Railway 3

The Snaefell Mountain Railway really shouldn’t exist – a line to a bleak mountain top, using barely altered Victorian technology, built to a different gauge to the line it connects with.

While Alexander Bruce was engaged in constructing what became the 3ft-gauge Manx Electric Railway he was also driving an electric-powered mountain railway to the summit of Snaefell, the “snow mountain”, just over 2,000 feet above sea level.

For this he enlisted the engineer George Noble Fell, whose father, John Barraclough Fell, had developed an Incline Railway system, involving a central third rail to provide extra adhesion.  Because of this additional rail, the Snaefell Mountain Railway has a gauge of 3ft 6in.

The line was built with astonishing speed, beginning in January 1895:  despite the “Great Snow” and a navvies’ strike, the 4½-mile route, climbing at an average gradient of 1 in 12, was complete and ready to operate – with track and overhead in place and a coal-fired power station halfway up the mountain – in less than eight months.  The opening ceremony took place on August 20th 1895.

It turned out that the six 100hp electric cars, the most powerful in Britain at the time, could cope with the gradient without the Fell drive, but the centre rail was retained for braking.

In 1896 a hotel, which became known as the Bungalow, was built at the halfway passing loop and a further battlemented hotel was constructed at the summit in 1906.

Through all the political uncertainties that threatened the island’s railways as traffic declined from the 1950s onwards, the Snaefell cars have run up and down the mountain.

Car 5, destroyed by fire in August 1970, was rebuilt and returned to service within a year;  the entire Snaefell fleet was equipped with new bogies built by London Transport and electrical equipment from Aachen tramways in the mid-1970s.

Car 3 ran away empty from the Summit in March 2016 and was derailed on the bend before the Bungalow.  It was smashed to pieces and a decision has yet to be announced about whether to build a replica incorporating parts of the original.

The Summit hotel was burnt down in 1982 and rebuilt two years later, and new car sheds were built for the Snaefell fleet in 1995.

Now, in the twenty-first century, the Snaefell line has more purpose than ever – the Summit Sunday lunches, sunset dinners, astronomical suppers (branded “Pie in the Sky”) with telescopes provided.

Only in the Isle of Man… http://www.gov.im/publictransport/Rail/snaefell.

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.