Category Archives: Transports of Delight

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.

 

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks

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Ribblehead Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, North Yorkshire

Ribblehead Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, North Yorkshire

The Settle & Carlisle Railway need never have been built.  The Midland Railway company, infuriated by the cavalier treatment of its passengers by its rival, the London & North Western Railway, was looking for an independent route for its Yorkshire and North Midlands passengers to Scotland.  A plan to connect Settle with the East Coast Main Line fell through, and the company went to Parliament for approval to build a route from Settle to Carlisle on the West Coast Main Line to connect with its Scottish partner railways.

This might have been a feint, like the Ecclesbourne Valley railway, and indeed the L&NWR in due course offered improved facilities if the Midland would drop their plans, but the Midland’s partners lobbied Parliament to insist that the line was built, at the very worst possible time, the economic slump of 1866-7, when two major railway companies went bankrupt and the Midland was already involved in building other main lines to London and Manchester.

The Midland’s manager, James Allport, recorded his feelings when he realised they would have to go through with the project:

I shall never forget, as long as I live, the difficulties surrounding the undertaking.  We walked over the greater part of the line from Settle to Carlisle, and we found it comparatively easy sailing till we got to that terrible place, Blea Moor.

Building the line was a nightmare, and operating it through some of the most stunningly beautiful and inhospitable country in England has never been a picnic.  Settle & Carlisle signalmen and stationmasters grew used to controllers in Leeds and Carlisle flatly refusing to believe their weather warnings, because snow on the fells frequently coincides with calm, dry weather in the lowlands.

In 1963 several trains were completely buried and a member of one snow-clearing crew, tramping through the drifts, suddenly disappeared though the cab roof-light of an otherwise invisible locomotive.

A plan to build a loco depot at Garsdale was abandoned because the engines would have frozen up standing idle in the winter:  the Garsdale water tower had to be steam heated, and the turntable was walled in after a loco caught the gale and spun round uncontrollably for hours.

There is no other railway quite like the Settle & Carlisle.  Its builders created – against huge odds – a high-speed main-line railway, opened in 1876, across the backbone of England.  Generations of a distinct breed of railway crews kept it going in often unenviable conditions.  And a particular generation of local people and rail enthusiasts fought a twenty-year battle from the 1970s onwards to oppose closure.

It’s hard to believe, sailing across the hills in modern rolling stock, or watching the trains go by from the numerous vantage points along the route, that it’s only in the last decade and a half that the line that should never have been built in the first place has secured a firm future in the modern railway network.

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.

King’s Cross

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King's Cross Station (1977)

King’s Cross Station (1977)

King’s Cross Station (opened 1850) has long been overshadowed by its neighbour St Pancras (opened 1867).  That was precisely the intention of the directors of the Midland Railway, the designer of the St Pancras train-shed, William Henry Barlow, and the architect George Gilbert Scott, whose Midland Grand Hotel was intended, until the railway directors insisted on cutting it down to size, to be two storeys higher than the existing building.

King’s Cross is actually well worth a look.  Built for the Great Northern Railway by Lewis Cubitt, it originally had only two platforms.  As traffic built up, its operation became notoriously chaotic, right into the 1930s when the signalling was sorted out just as the entire station threatened to seize up.

The original train-shed was built by the Wiebeking System of laminated timber construction, a pioneering effort to cover a wide space that eventually had to be replaced by iron girders.

Lewis Cubitt’s elegant, understated façade has for long been obscured:  it was revealed once more in 2013.

What King’s Cross lacks in visual impact it gains in its stories.

Queen Boudicea is reputed to be buried somewhere under platforms 8, 9 and 10.  Indeed, the area was known as Battle Bridge, commemorating the formidable queen’s last stand, until a much-derided monument to George IV briefly occupied the site.

The station featured with St Pancras in the 1955 film The Ladykillers, and the Hogwarts Express famously departed from Platform 9¾ in the Harry Potter books and films.

King’s Cross Station was the scene of a wonderful encounter between Ann Widdecombe and an Irishman who flung his arms round her in the middle of the concourse:  “He wanted to thank me for the peace process in Northern Ireland,” she remarked.

It’s also the pretext for a little-known story about the Abdication.

In late 1936 Mrs Wallis Simpson apparently took a taxi from her London residence to catch her train for a weekend up north.  “King’s Cross,” she said to the driver.

“I’m sorry to hear that, madam,” he replied.

 

 

Midland Grand

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Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel was once the finest place to stay in London but from 1935, when it was converted to railway offices, it stood neglected and increasingly dirty, and in the 1960s it narrowly escaped demolition.

I first knew it well in the 1970s when I brought adult-education groups from the north Midlands to visit sites in London by rail.  I had a deal with a British Rail group-travel organiser I won’t name (even though he’s deceased), whereby if I took the group round the back of the old hotel and presented the man who answered the door with a brown envelope we more or less had the run of the building.

At that time the lower floors were offices for the British Rail catering division, Travellers’ Fare, and the upper storeys had only recently been vacated by restaurant-car crews who had used them as sleeping accommodation on overnight turns.

We would climb to the top of the building in the ancient lift and tramp on to the roof above Euston Road, noticing that each chimney-stack was numbered to assist the chimney sweeps.  We went inside the clock tower to admire the clock.

And we enjoyed the astonishing three-storey main staircase under its Gothic vault painted with stars.  The first time we went the original fitted carpet was still in position, with the faded patch where the German band positioned their harmonium until they abruptly departed in 1914.

In the reception area we wondered at the bracket clock, still being wound weekly by a clockmaker whose contract had not been cancelled in 1935.

The offices closed in 1988 when British Rail was refused renewal of the fire certificate.  Although the exterior was cleaned and restored in the 1990s, finding a use for an obstinately sturdy Grade I listed building took time, and was eventually kick-started by the decision to adapt the under-used station for Eurostar.

At last the building has come back to life.  The upper storeys of the original hotel are converted into luxury apartments by the Manhattan Loft Corporation, and the remainder, with a new, sympathetically designed extension on Midland Road, is a Marriott Renaissance Hotel which opened in 2011.

Mike Higginbottom offers a one-hour lecture, St Pancras Station, including images taken from the mid-1970s onwards.  For further details, please click here.

 

Built around beer barrels

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St Pancras Station (1977)

St Pancras Station (1977)

My Isle of Man friend John asks interesting questions.

When he disembarked at King’s Cross Station (after pausing to photograph his late-teenage son Matthew in front of Platform 9¾) he crossed the road to St Pancras and texted me “Why are the trains at St Pancras upstairs?”.

The answer is the Regent’s Canal.

When the first railway into London, the London & Birmingham, was built in 1837 the engineer Robert Stephenson tunnelled under the canal to reach the site of Euston terminus.  The fact that this created a stiff incline out of the station wasn’t an immediate concern, because trains were initially cable-hauled to Camden Town where locomotives were attached.  Subsequently, steam locomotives always had to work hard on the climb out of Euston.

In the late 1840s the competing Great Northern Railway was built into King’s Cross Station.  Its engineers, Sir William and Joseph Cubitt, also tunnelled under the Regent’s Canal, creating a challenging 1 in 107 gradient for steam locomotives and a constricted exit from the station, the “Throat”, leading to Gas Works and Copenhagen tunnels.

William Henry Barlow, the engineer of the Midland Railway, chose the alternative when his company’s London Extension approached the site of St Pancras station in the mid-1860s.  He bridged the canal, so that the terminus platforms are fifteen feet higher than the street level. His magnificent train shed, with its uninterrupted arch 240 feet wide and 100 feet high, is engineering elegance in every sense:  not only does it look superb, but the ties beneath the platforms mean that a heavy locomotive could safely sit at any point without overloading the floor.

Pedestrians and taxis have always approached the platforms by ramps and stairs, and travellers used not to be aware of the vast undercroft below the platforms.  This – now revealed as The Arcade and the Eurostar booking area – was intended to store Burton beer, brought down the line and lowered by a hydraulic lift from track level.  Indeed the entire station is built to a module of 14 feet 8 inches, the dimensions of the Victorian beer barrel.

It’s no coincidence that one of the Midland Railway directors was Michael Thomas Bass Jnr, and that in the years after excise duty was removed from beer glasses in 1845, the dark London porter traditionally served in pewter tankards gradually gave way to the lighter ales brewed in Burton.

In the days before Eurostar, the undercroft was the rumoured location of the apocryphal “St Pancras Hoard”, silverware hidden when the Midland Grand Hotel closed in 1935.

Now at last, thanks to the redesign of the station in 2003, it’s possible walk off the street and reach the trains by lift or escalator.  As you walk into the former undercroft and gaze up at the train shed above, your spirits will be lifted by the colour of the arches – “English Heritage Barlow Blue”.

The ironwork was originally brown, until in 1877 the general manager of the Midland Railway, James Allport, remarked, “Why cannot the train shed be the colour of the sky?” In the age of steam it didn’t stay sky-coloured for long;  now W H Barlow’s wonderful space, reglazed to its original pattern, has become one of the most exciting sights in the capital.

Mike Higginbottom offers a one-hour lecture, St Pancras Station, including images taken from the mid-1970s onwards.  For further details, please click here.

Risk of grounding

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Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

One of the peculiar attributes of the Cromford & High Peak Railway was that it provided water-supply, not only for its own engines but also for adjacent farms and quarries on the high limestone hills that it traversed.

The water was carried along the line in trains of reused locomotive tenders which were filled from a spring at High Peak Wharf.  One of these tenders was rescued when the line closed in 1967 and ultimately ended up in the reserve collection of the National Railway Museum.

This fascinating but unspectacular piece of railway archaeology would hardly attract attention in the main museum at York, and has been loaned to the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway [http://www.e-v-r.com] in Derbyshire, where it’s locally relevant.  There it stands, in a siding, labelled “Cromford” as you’d expect.

Apparently, this is incorrect.  Someone at the Middleton Top Visitor Centre [http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/countryside/countryside_sites/visitor_centres/middleton_top/default.asp], which is beside the actual trackbed of the C&HPR, has interviewed the last surviving engine-driver, who is adamant the tender at Wirksworth couldn’t possibly have got up the cable-hauled Middleton Incline.

It has six wheels.  All the tenders based at Cromford had four wheels:  indeed, the six-wheeled versions had their middle wheels removed precisely so they could breast the top of the inclines.

The tender now at Wirksworth must have come from the other end of the line.  Perhaps it should say “Parsley Hay” on the side.

Does this matter?  Certainly not to 99.9% of the EVR’s visitors.  But it shows that to make historical and archaeological facts as accurate as possible, it’s important to listen to living witnesses.  Oral history matters, even if it’s as prone to misinterpretation as written or moving-image evidence.

Shunter hunters

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Peak Rail, Rowsley, Derbyshire: British Railways D2284

Peak Rail, Rowsley, Derbyshire: British Railways D2284

Wandering round the Peak Rail site at Rowsley South in Derbyshire, I came across a gentleman in a shed surrounded by more 1960s and 1970s heavy diesel shunting locomotives than you could shake a stick at.

Peak Rail provides a home and facilities for a number of specialist rail-preservation societies, and I was intrigued by the work of the Heritage Shunters Trust [http://www.heritageshunters.co.uk], who conserve and commemorate an extraordinary episode in the non-development of British Railways.

When the Attlee government nationalised the railways in 1948, the initial policy was to run the railways on steam and coal-fired electricity to make best use of the British coal industry.  Only later did the cheapness of imported oil become economically irresistible.

After British Railways decided in 1955 to phase out steam (having built over 3,500 locomotives since 1948, 999 of them to brand-new designs) there was a rush to obtain sufficient diesel locomotives on a one-for-one replacement basis.  In particular, small, heavy-duty steam shunters were replaced by a great variety of diesel equivalents, some to designs which had not been fully tried and tested.

This policy ignored the fact that single-wagon loads of freight were diminishing, as road transport became more efficient and cost-effective.  By the mid-1960s increasing amounts of rail freight were moving in train-loads not wagon-loads and there was less and less need for shunting locomotives.

This huge, diverse fleet proved to have been a waste of money, and not all of them were capable of doing the job they were intended for.  As pieces of engineering history, however, the different designs are fascinating.

There are over twenty of these engines at Rowsley, some fully restored, others awaiting attention.  I asked my guide what the display policy was – is it an art gallery of locomotive design, or do the workable engines have a practical function?  There is, after all, not much more shunting to do at Rowsley than there was on British Railways after the 1960s.

The major annual jamboree when the working shunters get an outing used to be the Shunter Hunter weekend when the Trust took over the Peak Rail line and worked all the passenger services.  This put up to ten shunting locomotives on the line.

As a means of raising funds to help volunteers preserve the engineering heritage it was a worthwhile enterprise.  And it was entertaining into the bargain.

The Shunter Hunter weekend has now become part of Peak Rail’s Diesel Weekend:  http://www.peakrail.co.uk/dieselweekend. 

Birkenhead Tramway

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Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society: Birkenhead Corporation Tramways 20 at Woodside Ferry

Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society: Birkenhead Corporation Tramways 20 at Woodside Ferry

Photo:  Janet Miles

The first time I visited the Birkenhead Tramway, which preserves a representative collection of trams from both sides of the River Mersey along with numerous buses and cars, I fell into a conversation that highlighted why individuals give up so much time literally to make such museums work.

I asked one of the museum workers about the Birkenhead tram we were standing next to.  This splendid vehicle had spent the years 1937-1983 as a potting shed, and the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society rescued it by providing the owner with a brand-new potting shed.  I asked how much of the original tram still survived.

The short answer is – the middle bit downstairs.  The ends, the top deck and the running gear are all second-hand or fabricated – necessarily, because who needs a double-deck potting-shed with wheels and a trolley pole?  My guide showed me the high-quality original interior woodwork, including the finely carved borough coats-of-arms, that had remained untouched and had polished up marvellously.

I asked a question that had fascinated me:  he was nowhere near thirty years of age, so why did he spend time preserving a mode of transport that virtually died out long before he was born?  I’m the last generation that can recall traditional street tramways in such cities as Liverpool;  for him, they’re out of the history books.

He told me he was a graduate engineer.  In his daily work he sits at a computer screen.  Occasionally he clicks his mouse and eventually a lathe or cutting-machine miles away springs into action which he never sees.

As he put it, by coming down to Taylor Street once or twice a week, he sees a potting shed gradually resurrected.  Metal, wood, glass and paint come together and eventually, after two or three years, the pole is lifted to the overhead wire, the thing lights up and trundles away.  That’s real engineering.

And that’s why we should all be grateful to “anoraks” – and “overalls”.

Details of the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society’s activities are at http://www.mtps.co.uk.

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day

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London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

In some circles, the term “anorak” is pejorative, indicating greasy outdoor clothing, a camera and an unhealthy predilection for standing on railway bridges and the ends of station platforms with a notebook.

In a particularly fine evocation of the attraction of watching steel wheels on steel rails, the journalist Mike Carter, [‘Shunted on a branch line to nowhere’, The Observer, June 25th 2000], tells of the reaction when he asked the assistant at W H Smith, Birmingham New Street, if they still sold trainspotting books:  “‘I don’t think we sell that type of thing any more’, she said, looking at this 35-year-old man as if I’d just asked for the latest copy of Nuns in Rubber.”

I argue that the general public and its posterity owe a great debt to those who spend their weekends scraping rusty metal, polishing brass, learning to drive locomotives, trams, buses and cantankerous vintage cars – or making models of long-gone vehicles. If they also spend their evenings arguing over which defunct railway company had the smartest engines, or how many electric dustcarts operated in Birmingham after the last war, there are far worse ways of passing the time.

And without the “anoraks”, where would we now hear the beat of a steam train approaching, admire the sheer craftsmanship of coach-built cars, buses and trams, sail in a paddle-steamer, see in flight the aircraft that fought the Battle of Britain?

I spent an entertaining Sunday in March at the London Transport Museum Acton Depot, where they keep the trams, buses and Underground trains that won’t fit into the Covent Garden museum, along with piles of memorabilia ranging from posters to railway signals.

I was astonished at the range and variety of volunteer-built models on show – highly convincing representations of trams and Underground rolling-stock ranging in size from miniatures you could hold in your hand to models you could ride on.

You can, of course, buy kits or ready-made models if you want a train, bus or tram to put on your mantelpiece.  You can even buy the kits of my fifties childhood – Bayko and Hornby Dublo. But I most admire the craftsmen (mainly, so far as I could see, men) who spend countless hours getting the detail right and making the whole thing work.

They recreate scenes and customs that vanished a couple of generations ago.  One shows, for instance, how the four-track tramway layout at Dog Kennel Hill in East Dulwich operated, and why it was necessary [see http://londonmodeltramways.webs.com/dogkennelhillmodel.htm and http://www.londontramways.net/articles/dog_kennel_hill.php].  Another provides the only opportunity so far to compare the size of first-generation London trams with the vehicles of Croydon Tramlink, because there was a layout running models of both.

It’s essentially a species of entertainment, and well worth a tenner and a few hours’ time.

Future London Transport Museum Acton Depot Open Day arrangements are at http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/museum-depot/events.