Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Telford’s triumph

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Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Ellesmere Canal

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Ellesmere Canal

Pontcysyllte is one of the major triumphs of British canal engineering, and the most spectacular travellers’ experience on British waterways, whether you walk or sail across it.  The 1,007-foot long aqueduct carries the waters of the Ellesmere Canal 126 feet above the River Dee.

Vertigo can be a problem.  Whenever I’ve taken groups to Pontcysyllte there’s no guarantee they’ll all walk the length of the towpath, despite the protection of railing five feet high;  indeed, I know of people who only managed to sail across by lying on the floor of their boat with their eyes closed.

Industrial archaeologists argue over how to apportion credit for this magnificent structure.  The engineer of the Ellesmere Canal was William Jessop (1745-1814), well-established, busy and – it has to be admitted – not always successful in building masonry aqueducts.  At the Dee crossing, one of Jessop’s team had suggested dropping the canal down each side of the valley by flights of locks to a low-level three-arch aqueduct:  this idea amounted to throwing two lockfuls of water away for every boat that crossed.  Jessop pointed out that a smaller number of locks feeding into a taller aqueduct would save a third of construction costs, but still use up huge amounts of water.

When Thomas Telford (1757-1834) was appointed to take direct charge of constructing the canal, with Jessop as consultant, he pointed out that building an iron-trough aqueduct across the valley at the height of the canal would actually cost no more to construct and would speed up traffic by eliminating lockage without any loss of water whatsoever.

Using cast iron for this purpose was a new and virtually untried technique.  Telford took the opportunity to field-test the principle when he took over as engineer of the Shrewsbury Canal and completed the Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct (1796), and then rehearsed it further down the Ellesmere Canal at Chirk Aqueduct (1801) before ordering the ironwork for Pontcysyllte, which was completed and opened in 1805.

Visiting Pontcysyllte is an unmissable experience, whether by boat or on foot.  From there it’s possible to walk down to Chirk Aqueduct and back within half a day, or to walk into Llangollen in an hour or so.  A more relaxing experience, starting from Llangollen Wharf, is to catch a horse-drawn trip-boat to Pontcysyllte, or a diesel boat across the aqueduct (one way, with a return journey by courtesy coach):  Llangollen Wharf – Aqueduct Trips (horsedrawnboats.co.uk).

The best experience of all, though, once every five years when the ironwork is inspected, is when the waterways engineers pull the plug in the aqueduct bed, sending the canal water cascading down to the Dee.  You have to get up early for that.

Exploring Australia 12: by rail from Melbourne to Sydney

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Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Taking advice from the invaluable The Man in Seat 61 website [http://www.seat61.com/Australia.htm], I’d booked an ordinary economy ticket for the train from Melbourne to Sydney.  The Man in Seat 61 points out, and illustrates, that the seating is identical in both economy and first.  My fare, for a twelve-hour journey, was A$110.70 [approximately £70].

Although the incoming train arrived and departed an hour late and lost a further half-hour getting out of the Melbourne suburbs, the on-board service compensated for the genuinely unavoidable delays.  The female train captain made meticulous announcements after every stop about the continuing delay, sometimes as little as seventy-odd minutes but usually ninety.  Each time she apologised, citing a signal failure on the incoming journey and track maintenance “which is necessary for your safety and comfort”:  I assume also that our train had lost its path, as railwaymen say, and was fighting against other traffic running to time.  We arrived at Sydney Central at 9.30 pm, exactly twelve hours after our departure from Melbourne.

The buffet car was a dream, with efficient staff and meticulous PA announcements.  The idea of a “Devonshire cream tea” (the complete tea, jam, scones and cream version) as a mid-morning refreshment took a little time to sink in.  Otherwise, decent airline-style cooked meals, interesting orange and poppy-seed cake, reasonable tea and excellent coffee filled the intervals of the day.

This was the most visually interesting journey of my odyssey across Australia.  The landscape was verdant heading east out of the state of Victoria.  We passed Australian backyards, small towns fronting on to the railway tracks and farmyards.  It was noticeable that the sheep stations loaded their stock on to road vehicles, not the railway line as they do in the more remote areas of Western and Southern Australia.

Some stops stood out as landmarks on the journey:  Seymour, clearly a historic railway town with a large steam museum, a town which I thought by the PA announcement was called Manila or Vanilla but turned out to be Benalla, a place with the strange, delightful name Uranquinty and the major settlement, Wagga Wagga, which the locals call “Wogga”.  Some railway stations have original or authentic signage at Junee and Moss Vale – “Ladies’ Room” and “Telegraph Office”.

After Junee the entire character of the journey changes.  The line becomes double track, and crosses the mountains by wiggling up and down hills continuously:  there is hardly a straight stretch for many miles, and often the line ahead is visible at right angles to the direction of travel.  At one point the two tracks diverge wildly, crossing and recrossing at the Bethungra Spiral.

This is working rail travel.  Passengers got on and off at each stop, unlike the set-piece Great Southern luxury trains.  The largest and loudest man in Australia helped fellow passengers with their puzzle books, in between phoning his relatives ahead with repetitive news of the delay.  I chatted to a young man from Surrey who was working his way round the world driving combine harvesters in preparation for managing his father’s farm on his return to the UK.  Outside the window, train-spotting kangaroos sat by the track, with that odd limp-wristed stance as if they’ve just finished washing the dishes.

The arrival into Sydney Central, cathedral of the age of steam, is an apt overture to a great city – an engaging contrast with the airy, modern steel and glass of Melbourne Southern Cross.

A nice taxi driver took me on a brief tour of Sydney before depositing me at my hotel, which I discovered the following day is three minutes’ walk away.  At that time of night, after twelve hours on a train, I’m more than happy for someone to hump my luggage and drive me around for five minutes for A$8 [about £5].

There’s a well-edited 2018 film of the northbound daylight XPT journey at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMztI752wWI.

Exploring Australia 9: The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant

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Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, Melbourne, Australia

Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, Melbourne, Australia

The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant [http://www.tramrestaurant.com.au/en/] is a stroke of business genius.  There is no more appropriate place to dine in Melbourne than on a tram.  This popular tradition, dating back to 1983, operates twice nightly, providing a five-course dinner and liberal amounts of alcohol while gliding and occasionally grinding along the streets of central and southern Melbourne to the greatest hits of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Abba.  Irresistible.

There are actually three trams, clearly the same American-style model as the City Circle vehicles, and from the outside they look surprisingly tired, in a dull red-brown livery with lamps missing from the illuminated display above the door.  Inside, however, the two restaurant compartments are a feast of plush curtains and mirrors and extremely comfortable seating in twos and fours:  each of the two compartments seats a total of eighteen.  The maitre d’s introductory announcement mentions that the evening takes 3½ hours and that the on-board lavatory is the smallest in the southern hemisphere.

The staff of three that I witnessed at work was the acme of teamwork.  No sooner had the wheels begun to turn than the champagne came round, and as we pottered back and forth, reversing from time to time, they presented a choice of pâté, a choice of entrée (the Australian term for a starter), of which I had duck risotto, and a choice of main course, of which I had an excellent, thick and perfectly cooked steak.  The trams are fitted with stabilisers, and there was – wisely – no thought of soup.

Individual service was leisurely, in keeping with the steady ride through the streets, while the staff worked non-stop to maintain an efficient and apparently effortless service to thirty-six covers.  And all the time the wine, a simple choice of red or white, was poured and poured again.  It was one of those wine-waiter situations where the only way to slow the flow is to keep the glass full.  I forgot.

There’s something magical about gliding through the streets, gazing through tinted windows at the ordinary world we customarily inhabit – people waiting at crossings and tram-stops, yellow taxis picking up fares, shop windows, houses.

There was only one discordant moment, somewhere around the University, when the car paused opposite a tram-shelter where there was what in England is called a tramp and in the United States a “derelict”, complete with his carrier bags, seated in state.  The tram moved forward to reverse in front of a urinal.

Most of the time we processed back and forth around the centre and out to the beach-resort of St Kilda, which is magical in the evening.  After the main course, the three trams parked up at Albert Park for a cigarette-break, and then dessert (in my case date pudding), coffee and liqueurs were served.  Eventually, in good time, we were returned to our starting point, where a fleet of taxis was lined up waiting.  I sauntered into my hotel thinking I’d quite like a malt whisky, but fortunately the bar was shut.

The following morning I didn’t want to move very fast.  At the coffee shop (I’d given up on the hotel breakfast) the barista made a great deal of noise bashing and grinding behind his big machine.  When I walked across to the Southern Cross Station the locomotives were roaring very loudly.  I caught a tram, which shook a great deal, to St Kilda and sat very quietly until I felt better.

The Colonial Restaurant Tram is not cheap, and worth every cent.  But it’s a good idea to keep the wineglass full for much of the time.

Update:  The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant is not operating at present because of an apparently acrimonious dispute:  Melbourne’s famous tram restaurant sues Yarra Trams (theage.com.au).

Exploring Australia 8: Melbourne

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City Circle tram, Melbourne, Australia

City Circle tram, Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne largely moves on steel wheels on steel rails.  It’s certainly the only city in Australia, and arguably one of the few in the world, which still runs a complete, traditional street tramway system.  This isn’t an isolated route with heritage overtones, like Blackpool or Adelaide, or even a vestige like Boston or Rome;  this is a full-on, in-yer-face tram system, with 27 routes covering most of the city, running single-deck vehicles of different dates and sizes up to the very latest 21st-century sophisticated models, operating with very cheap fares and some free travel.  Buses, I eventually noticed, are a rarity.

The suburban rail system is also ubiquitous.  There are some places in the city-centre (which the locals call the Central Business District, or CBD, rather like Chicago’s Loop) where it’s possible – with trams screeching round tight curves and trains rumbling overhead on viaducts – to imagine you’re sitting in the midst of someone’s gigantic train set.  There is even a compact version of London’s Circle Line, circumambulating the CBD sub-surface between five stations.

On Sunday I could travel the entire network – trams, trains and buses if I could find any – for the price of a Sunday Saver ticket, A$3.10 [less than £2];  on Monday the same facility for Zone 1, which extends as far as a visitor would reasonably need, cost A$6.80 [around £4.25].  Notices on the trams and tram stops showed that Christmas Day travel was free of charge, and on New Year’s Eve trams ran throughout the night until the New Year’s Day timetable began.

One consequence of the plethora of tram tracks is that Melbourne motorists perform a manoeuvre called a “hook turn” to ensure trams have priority at green lights.  To turn right at a tramway crossing (the Australians drive on the left), it’s necessary to move into the left-hand lane on the crossing, wait until all traffic has passed by and then make a tight right turn just as the lights change.  I repeatedly saw this operation completed with skill and grace, but I think I’d be a wimp and take three left turns round the block rather than put myself in such a situation.

The ideal way to orientate in Melbourne is by means of the free circular tram service which circumscribes the CBD, following almost exactly the route of the underground line, with a dogleg spur to the Waterfront City on the redeveloped Docklands.  This is operated by distinctive heritage trams, rugged streetcars with an American appearance.  There is a recorded commentary and, unlike visitor tours in many places, trams run in both directions so it’s easy to hop backwards and forwards between sites.

The CBD is an elongated oblong:  it’s a comfortable stroll across the short axis, but quite a tramp along the long axis from Southern Cross Station to the Parliament House.  The City Circle tram, with its commentary, makes it much easier to visit the city-centre sites, such as the Parliament House of Victoria, the Old Treasury (now the City Museum), the Old Melbourne Gaol and the Victorian Arts Centre.  I used it to visit Melbourne’s cathedrals, both impressive, the Anglican St Paul’s and the Roman Catholic St Patrick’s.

The only place I ate in Melbourne CBD was a delight.  Federici is attached to the Princess Theatre, opposite the Parliament House, and offers bistro-style food at all hours.  I missed the opportunity to see Jersey Boys at the Princess, because I had a prior engagement with the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant.

Exploring Australia 7: The Overland

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Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia

Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia

The Adelaide cab-driver pointed out, as he took me to the Parkland rail terminal, that there are quicker ways to Melbourne, but travelling on The Overland, the train that leaves Adelaide at breakfast time and makes it into Melbourne 10½ hours later, was part of my intention of seeing how big Australia is.

I travelled Red Premier class, which provides comfortable seating adjacent to the buffet car and a limited, rather relaxed trolley service.  Food is marginally more generous but no more ambitious than an average British rail company:  there was a customer stampede in late afternoon when the remaining pies were sold off at $2 [around £1.25] each.

The most interesting part of the journey from Adelaide is the first, because threading the line through the Adelaide Hills was clearly an engineering challenge.  The huge American-style rolling stock screeches round tight curves, over viaducts and through tunnels, and there are repeated views of the sea as the line climbs towards its summit at Mount Lofty.  At Mount Lofty station (where, apparently, you can hire self-catering apartments and train-spot to your heart’s content – http://www.mlrs.com.au), the line visibly dips down-grade and heads off into endless plains of farmland, the breadbasket of Australia.

For the remaining nine hours of the trip the train coasts through a gentle landscape, sometimes hilly and rather like southern England, often extensive flat plains stretching to the horizon or to distant hills.  There were few visual events on the journey – crossing the Murray River on a high viaduct with the original rail bridge, now used as a road, alongside, a few large towns like Ararat and Geelong.

At the start of the journey the train captain encouraged passengers to introduce themselves and talk to each other.  Imagine a British train manager suggesting such a thing!  That would really get the conversation going on the morning commute from East Grinstead.

There was an intermittent commentary, which I imagine was informative.  The commentator was BBC World Service in comparison to The Goons on The Ghan, but he read at breakneck speed, reminding me of the apocryphal Nancy Reagan story, where she was asked if she understood poor people and replied, “Yes, if they speak slowly.”

The man in the seat opposite at one point asked if I was bored with the landscape yet.  I said that I was never bored by landscape:  occasionally I dozed off, but I never opened the paperback I’d brought.

At last the train crawls into Melbourne, to the Southern Cross station, a spectacular steel tent draping a curvy roof over the platforms.  Stepping out on to Spencer Street gives an immediate impression of 1950s Glasgow – big, impressive buildings, a grid street plan and trams rattling across right-angled crossings.  The taxi-driver declined my fare, pointing to my hotel which was within sight.

 

Exploring Australia 5: The Ghan

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The Ghan

The Ghan

The Ghan backtracks over the route that brings the Indian Pacific into Adelaide, including the section from Tarcoola that the Indian Pacific traverses in darkness.  For someone who watches train-journeys like other people watch movies, this is like watching the last bit of DVD that you missed when you fell asleep – but backwards.

This is the great outback railway, originally opened between Oodnadatta and Alice Springs in 1929, along an alignment that proved prone to flash floods which regularly washed the track away.  Apparently the surveyors never saw any rain in all the time they were planning the route;  the rain only came when it was too late to divert the line.  The idea was always to link Adelaide with Darwin, but in the 1930s this made no financial sense.

In 1980 a new standard-gauge flood-free western route replaced the old narrow-gauge Ghan as far as Alice Springs, and the long-intended link to Darwin, via Katherine, was opened in 2004.

Heading northwards from the suburbs and satellite towns of Adelaide, the line runs through a huge plain of agricultural land – market gardens, crops, the occasional herd of cows, racehorses with coats on to protect them from the sun.  At some point in the past, someone cleared all this acreage to make agriculture possible, probably with no more than horse- and man-power at their disposal.

As the afternoon wore on, and the train glided effortlessly across mile after empty mile, I was aware that this vast landscape was initially explored by nineteenth-century pioneers on horseback, working out what there was and where it led from the vantage point of a saddle.  Before them, this land was the home of the Aboriginal peoples who, according to a self-serving 1938 writer quoted by Bill Bryson, “can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but…cannot withstand civilisation.”  The conflict between the two ways of life lies heavy still on the national consciousness.

I’ve now learned, having travelled on both the Indian Pacific and The Ghan, that the “welcome reception” is a compromise between the attraction of a free glass of champagne and the agony of a badly-handled radio mike with feedback.  Throughout the journey, whoever was in control of the on-board PA system wasn’t:  announcements and music cut in and out without warning and on at least one occasion photographers were told the train would slow down for a landmark in ten minutes’ time and it didn’t – leaving people gazing through windows bemused as whatever it was flashed by.

On this journey, though, the bonus was that I happened to meet a couple, Gabriel and Cornelia, with whom I struck up instant rapport.  They were in the midst of moving house between Melbourne and Darwin, using The Ghan as the easiest way of transporting a car full of luggage while the furniture took a slower route by road.  We share an interest in Victorian history (in the chronological, more than just the Australian geographical sense) and photography, and Gabriel promised me a list of things to see in Melbourne, a privilege I couldn’t otherwise have hoped for.

There was a brief stop at Port Augusta, where the 1980 Ghan route diverges from the original, ill-advised 1929 alignment.  This prompts me to plan to return some day, to ride the Pichi-Richi Railroad [http://www.prr.org.au/cms/index.php], which offers a 1¾-hour ride, often steam-hauled, along the original route in vintage 3ft 6in-gauge rolling-stock.

(Footage of the final journey on the narrow-gauge Ghan can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIIJSxSCX8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztgicynYVw.  A more extensive Channel 7 documentary of 1978 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2Jb_f5XCE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoWBObzkJE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94w94BdCUc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaB0D2Q7How.)

The Pichi-Richi people take the view that the name ‘Ghan’ derives from a passenger on the inaugural sleeping-car run in 1929 who, at an evening stop, rushed on to the platform to place his prayer-mat in the direction of Mecca:  the Australian crew assumed, it is said, that he was an Afghan.  The Great Southern Railway Company prefers to ascribe the name to the Afghan camel-trains which the railway replaced.

Port Augusta is the “gateway to the Outback”:  from there on, the landscape is as arid as the Nullarbor Plain, but more varied.  There are gentle contours, distant mountain ridges, a vast snowy white salt lake, river beds – one, the Finke River, a three-hundred-yard wide channel of bone-dry sand.  The landmarks are minor and far between – a stone marker for the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory, a statue, the Iron Man, commemorating the laying of the millionth sleeper on the 1980 route and, eventually, the MacDonnell Range which marks the location of Alice Springs.

Exploring Australia 2: The Indian Pacific

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The Indian Pacific: lounge car (2009)

The Indian Pacific: lounge car (2009)

The Indian Pacific is a serious train [http://www.gsr.com.au/site/indian_pacific.jsp].  For me, it’s the only way to see how big Australia is.  Starting from Perth at midday Wednesday, it takes nearly two days – two lunches, two dinners, two nights’ sleep, and one-and-a-half breakfasts (the latter a doggy-bag before disembarking at Adelaide).  For the even more serious-minded, it continues via Broken Hill to Sydney.

The line from Perth to Adelaide, or more specifically the section from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta, has major historical significance:  its construction clinched the deal by which Western Australia agreed to join the Commonwealth of Australia in 1900.  Without that deal Western Australia would have remained for the time being a British colony and would, very probably, have achieved independence like New Zealand.  (There was a point in the 1890s when New Zealand considered amalgamating with Australia, but the New Zealanders thought better of it.)

The statistics are awesome – 4,325 kilometres (2,687½ miles) for the full run from Perth to Sydney, crossing two time-zones, including the longest stretch of straight railway track (478 kilometres; 297 miles) in the world.

The train itself is awesome – 29 vehicles, including power cars, crew cars, baggage car and motor-rail vehicles, 771 metres (843 yards) long, 1,375 tonnes, drawn by one extremely powerful diesel locomotive – crawling its way across the endless landscape, much of the time on single track, pausing at passing places to make room for enormous freight trains.

It’s not cheap.  The basic version is Red Service – coach-style seating, by the look of it not dissimilar to basic Amtrak, in which people sit for days on end.  You see Red passengers boarding very sensibly carrying pillows.  There are also Red sleeper compartments.  The next version up is Gold Service – your own compartment, loos and showers at the end of the carriage, a comfortable bar car and a quite opulent dining car with all meals included.  There is something called Platinum Service, newly introduced with spare vehicles from the Ghan route:  apparently, the compartments are more roomy, with en-suite facilities.

On board Gold class, the single compartment is, rather like the interior of an airliner, a masterpiece of compact planning.  Even the wash-basin folds away.  The wardrobe, such as it is, is all of three inches wide;  the bed, of course, folds down;  the window-blinds sit within the double-glazed unit, controlled by an ingenious winding handle.  An odd consequence of the layout of the single compartments is that the central corridor is literally sinuous:  it curves from side to side.  Other coaches with double-bunk compartments have the customary layout with the corridor down one side.

There can be no better way to appreciate the vastness and emptiness of this great continent, without going to the lengths of driving for days on end, as Bill Bryson did in researching his excellent book, Down Under (2000).

I sat for the first hour or so, watching the route out through suburban Greater Perth, leaving behind the electric commuter trains, heading into the hills.  I chose to watch our way through an anonymous valley, with an accommodation road snaking alongside the track:  it was a good twenty minutes before I spotted any sign of life – a track-maintenance crew with their pick-up miles from anywhere.

Through a lunchtime glass of beer, an introductory presentation with a free glass of champagne, an interminable wait for second sitting and lunch itself, the landscape gradually opened out, became virtual desert, then became more verdant, hour after hour, mile upon mile.

As the first afternoon wore on, the train occasionally passed vast grain silos, then pastures with surprisingly purposeful-looking sheep, then monotonous low scrub, then patchy woodland.  For anyone used to watching rail journeys in Europe, this is indeed slow-motion travelling, despite the respectable speed of the train.  For hours on end there are no valleys, so no bridges or tunnels, hardly a cutting and never a viaduct.  Where there were cuttings, the rock varied in colour from pale grey to gunmetal to rust;  elsewhere the soil might be mustard or ochre.  That’s all there was to look at:  it was oddly restful.

Sometimes the trackside dirt road was punctuated by a gate, with the name of a ranch (which the Australians call a station) hidden beyond the horizon.  The lifestyle out here is a world away from the experience of most Europeans.  In all but the remotest corners of the British Isles, it’s a matter of choice not to go window-shopping, not to go the theatre or a big-league sporting event;  in populous regions education, health services, social life, variety is effectively on tap.  Living in rural Australia involves a direct reversal of these expectations.  These people must have particular qualities of self-reliance, initiative, stamina and determination.

The evening ended, after a convivial dinner, with a ludicrous but informative tour of the gold-mining twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the middle of the night, peering at nineteenth-century hotels and public buildings, viewing the huge floodlit Superpit on the outskirts of town and examining the remaining, innocuous-looking brothels on Hay Street.  The coach-driver was straight from Central Casting – began each stage of the journey with the expression “Okey-doke”, and all of his sentences? Went up at the end? Like they do in Australia?  He knew what he was talking about, and went out of his way to make sure we saw as much as we could in the circumstances.

And so, as they say, to bed…

 

Muddle and Get Nowhere

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Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

The holidaymaker’s experience of the Norfolk seaside was, until the late 1950s, bound up with the eccentricities of travelling on the former Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway, one of the less likely networks to emerge from the idiosyncracies of Victorian railway competition.

The East Anglian “main line” network was the Great Eastern Railway, fanning out from London Liverpool Street station to the major towns and cities – King’s Lynn, Hunstanton, Cromer, Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Ipswich and Southend.

Two of the Great Eastern’s competitors in the national network, the Midland and the Great Northern, recognised that by merging their interests in a string of cross-country lines into and across East Anglia they could reach ports and holiday resorts to capture freight and passenger flows into the Midlands and the North that the Great Eastern simply couldn’t deal with.  They could also provide competing services into London’s King’s Cross, though that route was never as fast as the Great Eastern’s more direct routes.

In 1893 the two companies set up a joint board, with equally shared rights and responsibilities, to manage their East Anglian operations.  Over the following sixty-odd years, the M&GNJR struggled against two particular difficulties – an excess of single-track mileage (over 60%) and heavy gradients across the grain of the landscape.  Normal services were laborious, and holiday specials spent much of their travelling time waiting in loops for approaching trains to clear the route – hence the popular nickname, “Muddle and Get Nowhere”.

The line was distinctive as well as eccentric, and came to be much loved by enthusiasts.  Its locomotives wore a golden ochre livery and its carriages were either built of teak or painted to look as if they were.  Almost the whole of the M&GNJR network, nearly 200 miles, closed down peremptorily in 1959, years before Beeching.

The line from Norwich to Cromer and Sheringham remains operational, and the North Norfolk Railway runs preserved steam and diesel trains between Sheringham and Holt [http://www.nnrailway.co.uk].  Otherwise, much of this extensive railway has completely disappeared – returned to farmland or woodland.

The track between Cromer and Holt is all that remains of the M&GNJR network:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIYUJd4q80.

Melton Constable, hub of the system with a four-way junction, workshops and workers’ housing, is no longer recognisable as the “Crewe of North Norfolk”.

A couple of summers ago my friend Terry, who knows a thing or two about railways and lives near Holt, spent a baffling morning showing me what little remains of railway archaeology in Melton Constable.

The most impressive relic is the bus shelter – not up to Ukrainian standards [see http://www.brama.com/travel/busstop.html] – but very dignified, with monogrammed ironwork from the station awning, painted in golden ochre.

The monogram in the ironwork clearly has the letters CNR – Central Norfolk Railway – a company that never actually operated:  the spandrels were cast in anticipation and reused by its successor, the Eastern & Midland Railway, itself an amalgamation formed in 1883.

The return of the Ring

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Sowerby Bridge Wharf, West Yorkshire (1979)

Sowerby Bridge Wharf, West Yorkshire (1979)

It’s interesting to compare the history and geography of the Rochdale Canal with the Huddersfield Narrow Canal.

The Rochdale is broad, while the Huddersfield Narrow was built narrow to save expense.  The Rochdale climbs over the Pennine ridge without tunnelling:  though its summit is lower than the Huddersfield Narrow (600 rather than 648 feet), it has more locks (92 rather than 74).  Consequently the Rochdale always had more difficulty with water-supply, especially after its reservoirs were sold to the Oldham and Rochdale Joint Water Board in 1923.  The Rochdale has a more circuitous route, yet it carried more traffic.  It also avoided railway ownership:  the Manchester & Leeds Railway (later the Lancashire & Yorkshire) remained a competitor, and the Rochdale Canal Company controlled the waterway until it was transferred to the Waterways Trust in 2000.

It went the way of most commercial waterways in the twentieth century, however.  The last through voyage was in 1937.  Most of the route was formally abandoned in 1952.  Only the Rochdale Nine, the locks connecting the Ashton Canal behind Manchester Piccadilly Station with the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield, remained nominally open, though I know people who endured a nightmare voyage down that flight in the 1970s.

Indeed, when the motorway network around Manchester was constructed in the 1960s, the course of the Rochdale Canal was considered fair game and was breached in several places. Once the Ashton Canal was reopened in 1974, allowing leisure craft to navigate the Cheshire Ring (covering the Macclesfield Canal and parts of the Trent & Mersey, Bridgewater, Rochdale, Ashton and Peak Forest Canals), the future of the Rochdale Nine was secured.

That made it feasible for the Rochdale Canal Society to begin its painstaking, seemingly impractical campaign to restore navigation all the way from Sowerby Bridge to Manchester.  This was accomplished – the isolated section between Todmorden and Hebden Bridge in 1983, extended to the summit in 1990, reconnected to the eastern waterways at Sowerby Bridge in 1996 and, finally, the western section in July 2002.  Like the parallel scheme to restore the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, the final phase involved the support of the local authorities – in this case Rochdale and Oldham – with financial contributions from the Millennium Commission and English Partnerships to a total of nearly £24 million.

The work involved was prodigious, requiring numerous diversions and bridge replacements, the construction of the deepest canal lock in Britain at Sowerby Bridge, the deepening of Anthony Lock following mining subsidence and the demolition of a Co-operative supermarket in Failsworth.

All this makes possible the South Pennine Ring, navigating the Ashton, Huddersfield Narrow, Huddersfield Broad and part of the Rochdale Canals and the Calder & Hebble Navigation.

There is a virtual cruise along the whole length of the restored Rochdale Canal at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/rochdale/rc3.htm, and detailed illustrations and explanations of the restoration work at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/rochdale/rc10.htm.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.

Longest, highest, deepest

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Huddersfield Narrow Canal: Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire (1979)

Huddersfield Narrow Canal: Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire (1979)

The building of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal is an epic story – nearly twenty miles of waterway spanning the highest canal route in England across a summit 648 feet above sea level, by means of 74 locks and the Standedge Tunnel, longest in Britain by far at 5,698 yards.  The canal’s construction was marred by the failure of two aqueducts and two reservoirs.  Begun in 1794, it eventually opened in 1811, six years after the death of its engineer, Benjamin Outram.

Owned and duplicated by the London & North Western Railway from 1848, it declined before and after it was legally abandoned in 1944.

Indeed, when I first knew it in the late 1970s, whole stretches of waterway had been filled in and some built over.  Most of the locks on the eastern Colne Valley stretch were cascaded.  It seemed that boats would never again climb to Standedge and penetrate the Pennine massif.

In fact, from 1974 onwards, a group of enthusiasts, the Huddersfield Canal Society, was steadily building momentum to make that dream possible.  A collaboration between the Society and three local authorities, Kirklees, Oldham and Tameside, together with British Waterways, engineered a restoration programme costing £30 million, most of it contributed by English Partnerships and the Millennium Commission, to restore the locks and, where necessary, reroute and regrade the canal.

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal fully reopened to navigation in May 2001.  A virtual trip along the entire canal is available at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/huddersfield/hnc3.htm.  (The Slaithwaite location illustrated above is at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/huddersfield/hnc56.htm.)  The same excellent website provides before-and-after images of the major restoration projects at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/huddersfield/hnc5.htm.

A visitor-centre was opened in the transhipment warehouse beside the Marsden portal of Standedge Tunnel, from where trip boats make a short journey into and out of the tunnel.  Once a month, on the first Saturday, it is possible to go all the way, so to speak – though you have to find your own way back, on foot or by bus.  Navigating the full length of the tunnel takes three hours:  http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/huddersfield/standedge6.htm shows the view from the bow of the boat.

Serious boaters can travel through under their own power three days a week.  Book early to avoid disappointment at http://www.standedge.co.uk/tunnel_trips.htm.

The Huddersfield Canal Society website is at http://www.huddersfieldcanal.com.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.