Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Whistle-stop at Heckington

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Heckington Windmill, Lincolnshire

Heckington Windmill, Lincolnshire

When my friend Elisabeth, who is one of the ladies who lunch, suggested stopping at Heckington during a drive round Lincolnshire, the tea-shop was our priority.  In fact, the tea-shop she had in mind was closed, but we found a new one, the Mill House Tearoom – a work in progress by Michaela Spenger and Ian Yardley who provide excellent pots of tea and pastries with a Viennese accent.

Alongside stands the unique eight-sailed Heckington Windmill [http://www.heckingtonwindmill.org.uk/products.html], which was built in 1830 with five sails, and uprated (as one would say of a motor-car) to eight sails in 1890 when the Mill House was built.  Commercial milling stopped in 1946, and the mill was restored to working order in 1986.  Eight sails means that this mill keeps grinding when others run out of wind.  Visitors are invited to climb through its five flours, and can buy Heckington Windmill flour to take home.

Alongside the windmill is a railway level-crossing, for the village has a full train-service between Nottingham and Skegness.  At least once an hour traffic stops as the signalman manhandles the gates, and the signal box works in the traditional way:  for everything you could want to know about this, see http://www.signalbox.org/gallery/e/heckington.htm.

The original 1859 Great Northern Railway station building was saved from demolition by the Heckington Village Trust in 1975, and now houses the Heckington Village Trust Railway Museum built around the layouts of the HVT Model Railway Club.  For £1.00 you can chat about trains and use the station loo.  Opening times are at http://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/popiOrgVenue.asp?vid=2109.

And, as Elisabeth and I found, you might see the arrival of a huge train from Nottingham too long for the platform, so that the rear carriages block the level crossing and Heckington grinds to a halt.

No pun intended.

For more illustrations of the windmill and the signal-box (though, oddly, not the station), see http://www.urban75.org/photos/england/heckington.html.

For the story of the Mill House Tearoom see http://www.sleafordstandard.co.uk/news/Tourists-to-get-more-at.5468333.jp and http://www.sleafordstandard.co.uk/news/Heckington-Mill-House-project-takes.5485289.jp.

 

Down by the Riverside

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Liverpool Riverside Station [left] and Princes Dock [right] from the Liver Building (1983)

Liverpool Riverside Station [left] and Princes Dock [right] from the Liver Building (1983)

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John was puzzled when he parked up at the ferry terminal in Liverpool to find himself standing on cobbled roadway with a complex set of railway lines embedded.

This turned out to be all that is left of Liverpool Riverside station, a legendary line by which passengers were transported directly to the quayside, so that they stepped out of their railway carriage and walked across a covered roadway directly to their ocean-going liner.

Boat trains left the main line at Edge Hill station, which still exists, and followed a steep descent through Victoria and Waterloo tunnels and then over a tight curve on to the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board tracks that led to the three platforms of Riverside station.  On the dock estate these trains proceeded literally at walking pace, following a man carrying a warning flag.

The appeal for trans-shipping passengers who would otherwise have to make their way across town from Lime Street station is obvious, but the operational practicalities made the service cumbersome even in the heyday of rail travel.

In any case, not long after this link was constructed in 1895 the major transatlantic passenger traffic began to migrate to Southampton, where the London & South Western Railway cannily built docks big enough to take the new generation of vessels which included Oceanic, Titanic and Britannic.  (The reason that Titanic had the lettering ‘TITANIC – LIVERPOOL’ on its stern was because the White Star Line registered its vessels from its Liverpool head office.  The ship never visited Liverpool.)

The real heyday of Liverpool Riverside appears to have been wartime, when it was heavily used for troop movements.  Indeed, according to the Disused Stations website [http://www.disused-stations.org.uk], the very last train brought troops embarking for Northern Ireland on February 25th 1971.

The place stood derelict until the 1990s, and is now transformed by the regeneration of Liverpool’s riverside.

PS:  Since John got back “across”, as they say in the Isle of Man, he’s passed me this very informative link about the rail links between Edge Hill and the Liverpool docks: https://localwiki.org/liverpool/Liverpool%27s_Historic_Rail_Tunnels.

PSS:  A 1950s image from the same viewpoint as the image above, the western tower of the Royal Liver Building, is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thanoz/2863774968.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Paddle-steamer for sale

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PS Lincoln Castle, beached at Hessle (1984)

PS Lincoln Castle, beached at Hessle (1984)

Two of the three of the pre-war paddle-steamers built for the London & North Eastern Railway’s Humber ferry have survived:  the fate of the third, Lincoln Castle, is a particularly sad story.

The first two, Wingfield Castle and Tattershall Castle (both built in 1934), each have safe harbours.  Wingfield Castle is moored at Jackson Dock as part of the Museum of Hartlepool [http://www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/attractions/wingfieldcastle.asp]; Tattershall Castle, though structurally altered, continues to earn her living as a pub-restaurant moored on the Thames Embankment in central London.

Lincoln Castle, however, has had a more chequered career.  Intended as a development of the two 1934 vessels, she was built by A & J Inglis on the Clyde in 1940.  The Heritage Trail website [http://www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/maritime/lincoln%20castle.htm] tells of the difficulty of moving her from the Clyde to the Humber under the twin threats of bombardment and U-boat operations to begin work in 1941.

The last coal-fired paddle-steamer in regular public service, Lincoln Castle was withdrawn from service in 1978 when the boilers were no longer safe.  She was beached at Hessle in the shadow of the Humber Bridge where she served as a pub from 1981 to 1987.  Then she was towed across the river to Immingham, refitted and taken, not without difficulty, to Grimsby’s Alexandra Dock where she opened as a pub-restaurant in 1989 alongside the Fishing Heritage Centre building and the trawler Ross Tiger [see http://www.nelincs.gov.uk/art-culture-and-leisure/museums-and-galleries/fishing-heritage-centre and http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/days-out-gone-fishing-in-grimsby-642392.html].

The Lincoln Castle pub closed in 2006 for renovations and because of concerns about the condition of the hull she was beached in a corner of the dock.  In 2010 she was put up for sale, with the threat that without a buyer she would have to be broken up. Between them, private sponsors, the North East Lincolnshire Council and the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society [http://www.heritagesteamers.co.uk/index.html] were unable to find a practical solution to the difficulty of preserving a significant example of British maritime history that needed a great deal of expensive work simply to keep her afloat.

The future of the Lincoln Castle rested on a knife-edge:  http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.gaytor1/index.html, http://www.paddleducks.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=2214.0, and
http://paddlesteamers.awardspace.com/LincolnCastle.htm.

In the end it was dismantled, and some of the parts rescued for possible reconstruction:  http://web.archive.org/web/20110707201606/http://paddlesteamers.awardspace.com/LincolnCastle.htm.

Images of the Lincoln Castle and her sister ships can be found at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.enefer/newholland/newhollandferries.htm.

Buxworth or Bugsworth?

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Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

The little village of Buxworth, just to the north of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, is a highly significant historic site.  Here the wagons of the Peak Forest Tramroad, which was completed in 1800 and still in use after the First World War, tipped their limestone into kilns and narrow boats for transportation down the Peak Forest Canal to Manchester and beyond.

The tramroad is an example of the principle that “if it works, don’t fix it”:  it used flanged rails rather than flanged wheels, with loaded wagons descending by gravity and empties returned by horse-power, and a braking system that consisted of sticking a metal pole into the spokes of the wheels.  When the iron rails wore out in the 1860s, the railway company that owned it simply fabricated new steel rails to an eighteenth-century design.

The tramroad was ripped up in the 1920s, though the stone blocks that supported the rails are still found in great numbers.  The canal went out of use, leaked and silted up, so that when I first went to Buxworth in the early 1970s the basin was a barely recognisable jungle.

The proposal to build a Whaley Bridge and Buxworth by-pass would have ploughed straight through the middle of it, until the Inland Waterways Protection Society [IWPS – http://www.brocross.com/iwps] successfully argued for it to be designated an Ancient Monument in 1977 and the by-pass alignment was moved to the south where it was eventually built.

The basin is intact and now beautifully preserved, entirely because the volunteers of the IWPS contributed time, physical labour and expertise, and begged, borrowed and salvaged materials to reveal and restore the complex, intriguing layout of a location that was a busy, dirty, money-making industrial site until a little more than a hundred years ago.

Now it offers peaceful, attractive moorings for canal boats, and on the day the Manager of the site, Ian Edgar, took my Waterways & Railways across the Derbyshire Peak group round, schoolkids were learning to canoe in one of the basins.

At the head of the basin is the Navigation Inn [http://www.navigationinn.co.uk/index.php?option=home], once run by Pat Phoenix, the actress who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, and now operated by Jan & Roger, who provide excellent beer and anything from a fried breakfast to an à la carte meal in congenial pub surroundings.  Jan tells me that she’s rearranging the canal memorabilia that came with the pub, so that you can read the walls coherently, one room after another.

Buxworth Basin is well worth a look, and if you talk to Ian Edgar, call it Bugsworth, as they did in the eighteenth century.  If you talk to your sat-nav, it’s Buxworth.

Walking the Manx Northern Railway

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Manx Northern Railway between St Germain's and Kirk Michael

Manx Northern Railway between St Germain’s and Kirk Michael, Isle of Man

If it’s not possible to ride a railway line – because someone removed the track – the best way to understand it is to walk it.  When the Manx railway-system was reduced to a single route in the 1970s, the Manx Government had the prescience to preserve much of the disused trackbed as footpaths.

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John and I walked the stretch of the former Manx Northern Railway from St Germain’s (where the station is now beautifully restored as a house) to Kirk Michael (where the railway station is now the fire station).

The Manx Northern was built to take mineral traffic from the Foxdale mines directly to Ramsey harbour, using the only route possible for steam locomotives round the west side of the island.  When the Foxdale mines eventually failed, the MNR became part of the Isle of Man Railway.  Meanwhile, passengers between Douglas and Ramsey had gained a more direct route when the Manx Electric Railway was built along the precipitous east coast of the island.

The Manx Northern route is spectacular.  Walking up to the summit at Ballaquine and down to Kirk Michael is not strenuous, but the gradients are palpable.  The ivy-covered piers of the major viaducts, Glen Wyllin and Glen Mooar, remain without the lattice deck that carried trains:  you feel the height involved while crossing from one abutment to the other by steep paths and flights of steps.

Travellers who are disinclined to walk the line can follow much of its course, and appreciate its spectacular views of the island’s west coast, on the Peel-Ramsey double-deck bus [routes 5 and 6], which is what John and I did – travelling in eight minutes the distance we’d walked in 2½ hours – when the pub in Kirk Michael proved unable to provide any kind of lunch.

Instead we went to the excellent Creek Inn in Peel [http://thecreekinn.co.uk/], where we were served by a star barman called Chris, and ate smoked salmon wrapped in asparagus and spicy chicken wraps with excellent beer and friendly service.

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.