Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Brown Bayley’s steam wagons

Brown Bayley Steels Ltd, Sentinel steam lorry no 6 (1968)

I’m very grateful to Stephen Johnson for providing me with a copy of his book The Other Mr Brown’s Business:  a short history of the firm of Brown Bayley’s Steel Works Ltd, Sheffield (2021), which is a significant contribution to the history of the Sheffield steel industry.

My granddad was a furnace bricklayer at Brown Bayley’s until shortly after the end of the Second World War, but my memory of the works in the 1950s is the common sight of their steam wagons, forerunners of the modern lorry, chugging around the streets.

The steam wagon like its contemporary, the electric tramcar, occupies the window between the initial superseding of horse power with mechanical traction and the eventual dominance of the internal combustion engine.

They were powerful and relatively fast, capable of 20mph fully loaded, and in their heyday far superior for their purpose to early petrol lorries.

Brown Bayley’s wagons were Sentinel Standard flat-bed lorries, mostly dating from the time of the First World War, bought to transport heavy materials around the company’s extensive Attercliffe steelworks and on occasions used for delivering materials further afield.

A well-documented journey in 1925 transported five-ton lengths of chain in three trips to stabilise the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, taking just over two days each way, with a day to unload at the destination.

The Brown Bayley fleet consisted of at least a dozen vehicles at its maximum, almost all of them registered in Shrewsbury rather than Sheffield or Rotherham by the manufacturer, Sentinel Waggon [sic] Works Ltd.

Brown Bayley’s wagons survived because they were robust and dependable, but they required a two-man crew like a railway steam locomotive, and they took ninety minutes to prepare from cold and used 1½cwt (1,524kg) of coke per shift.

Nevertheless they continued to work until 1970, when the last three were taken out of use.  The remaining wagons were snapped up for preservation by enthusiasts, apart from No 6 (AW 2964) which the Brown Bayley company exhibited at rallies.  It remains on static display at the Riverside Museum, Glasgow.

Others are still going strong, as these YouTube clips illustrate:  What’s the Greatest Machine of the 1930s…the Sentinel Steam Waggon? – YouTubeSentinel/ERF No.9370 ‘Typhoo’ Norwich to Ledbury – YouTube.

Forty Bridges

Great Northern Railway Pinxton Branch: Giltbrook Viaduct (1973)

One of the highlights of my freelance history lecturing work is speaking to the Kimberley Historical Society, north of Nottingham, where I’m made welcome and feel I know many of the members after repeated visits.

Almost invariably, my lecture is introduced by the chairman, Roy Plumb, and a few years ago I looked forward to visiting as a guest to sit back and listen to Roy lecture on the railways of Kimberley and the neighbouring settlement of Awsworth.

It didn’t work out because of a mix-up of dates, but I eventually caught up with Roy’s presentation when he spoke to the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct at the Hogs Head Pub and Restaurant at Awsworth on January 31st this year.

Roy continues to use a Carousel projector to show his slides, and achieves a clarity and precision that rivals digital projection.  He also has a steady hand with a laser pointer – a skill which I lack – and his account of the growth and decline of the local railways from 1797 until the early 1960s was masterly.

Two rival railway companies served the area between the Erewash and Leen valleys, the Midland and the Great Northern, bitter rivals trying to grab the coal trade from each other.  The Great Northern’s ambitious Derbyshire & Staffordshire Extension opened in 1878, running to Derby Friargate and beyond and with a branch up the Erewash Valley to Pinxton, and the Midland’s Bulwell-Bennerley Branch began working freight trains a year later.

Both lines entailed heavy civil engineering.  The Great Northern built the now-celebrated Bennerley Viaduct, which survived because its wrought-iron construction made demolition uneconomic in the 1970s.

At Awsworth Junction, where the Pinxton branch diverged from the Great Northern main line, the Giltbrook Viaduct curved across a road, two Midland Railway lines and the Greasley Arm of the Nottingham Canal.  Almost a third of a mile long, it was known locally as the Forty Bridges, though there were in fact forty-three arches,

Two arches, 8 and 23, were occupied by four-storey dwellings, which were used by construction workers and later served as an air-raid shelter for Awsworth schoolchildren during the First World War.  Their chimney pots graced the viaduct’s parapet.

This magnificent sinuous structure has disappeared because unlike the Bennerley Viaduct its brick-arch construction made it practical to demolish.  It was taken down in 1973, and much of the trackbed of the Pinxton Branch as far as Eastwood became the A610 trunk road.  Local people of a certain age still bemoan the loss of a magnificent landmark;  younger people haven’t a clue it ever existed.

If I’ve read the 1899-1900 25-inch Ordnance Survey sheet correctly, the Hogs Head pub stands on or near the site of Gilt Briggs Farm, which was surrounded by a cat’s cradle of railway lines.

Stepping out into the night at the end of Roy’s talk, it was possible to sense the ghosts of great embankments and bridges, and the clatter of goods trains in the night, trundling across the arches sixty feet above ground level.

The National Library of Scotland website provides an overlay of historic Ordnance Survey maps against modern satellite imagery:  Explore georeferenced maps – Map images – National Library of Scotland (nls.uk).  If necessary key the name ‘Awsworth’ into the search panel.

Aqueduct Cottage

Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (1977)
Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2010)
Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2020)
Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2022)

Among the wealth of industrial archaeology structures at the north end of the Cromford Canal, one of the most photographed is the picturesque little lock-keeper’s cottage at the end of the Wigwell Aqueduct, guarding the junction with the private Lea Wood branch.

This branch canal was constructed in 1802 by Peter Nightingale (great-uncle of Florence) to his mills at Lea Bridge 2½ furlongs away.  In 1819, as a result of a dispute over water rights, the branch was reduced to half its length and the wharf resited.

The lock at the junction was required to maintain the water-level in the branch at twelve inches higher than the main line, so that there was no risk of the canal losing water to the branch or vice versa.  An 1811 map shows that only half the existing building is original, extended sometime in the nineteenth century to make two dwellings, each with its own front door, and later combined to make a single house with the second doorway converted to a window.

Maintaining a household in this remote spot must always have been arduous.  Anne Eaton, who lived with her husband Josiah in the two-bedroomed cottage in the 1890s, raised eight children there.  She was on social terms with Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), whose family continued to own the surrounding land after selling the mills to the Smedley family in 1893.

The canal branch was last used in 1936, and traffic ceased on the main line from Hartshay to Cromford two years later.  The then owner, the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, formally abandoned the canal in 1944.

The local writer Alison Uttley (1884-1976) called Aqueduct Cottage “a Hans Anderson dwelling”, but she didn’t have to live in it.

By the time Lea Wood was sold to a private owner, Mr Bowmer, in 1951 the lack of amenities at the cottage was daunting.  The last occupant, Mr Bowler, lived there alone without piped water, sanitation, gas or electricity, until circa 1970.

The Derwent Valley section of the Cromford Canal was taken into guardianship by Derbyshire County Council in 1974 and most of it declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in 1981, but when Lea Wood was sold to the Leawood Trust for the benefit of the community there seemed no practical way to make the cottage usable, let alone habitable.

After the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site was established in 2001 the County Council produced a Conservation Management Plan which identified Aqueduct Cottage as a significant heritage asset.

In 2012 the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust took over Lea Wood, the canal branch and the cottage, and a volunteer group set about returning Aqueduct Cottage to its nineteenth-century condition as a visitor centre which, despite the interruption of the pandemic, is well on its way to completion [https://www.crichstandard.org/tourism/aqueduct-cottage-restoring-a-local-landmark.php], proving what can be done for a building on the brink with inspiration, energy and the know-how to find funding.

A short walk through the history of canal engineering

Wigwell Aqueduct, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire
Leawood Aqueduct, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2010)

Two silver threads run down the Derbyshire Derwent Valley between Matlock and Derby, the River Derwent and the Cromford Canal.

The valley bristles with monuments of industrial history, and the stretch of canal south from its terminus in Cromford is particularly rich in structures that typify and explain the archaeology of Britain’s inland waterways.

One of the most impressive – though difficult to see and photograph except in winter – is the Wigwell Aqueduct, designed by William Jessop to cross the River Derwent on a wide arch that carries the date 1793.

In its progress up the Amber and Derwent valleys the canal crossed both rivers by masonry-arch aqueducts – low arches in a long embankment over the Amber at Bull Bridge, now demolished, and a much higher, elegant single span across the Derwent at Lea Wood.  Both of these structures failed during construction and each had to be partly rebuilt at Jessop’s voluntary expense:  his famous comment on the injudicious economy of using Crich lime in the masonry of the Leawood aqueduct was,–

…Painful as it is to me to lose the good opinion of my Friends I would rather receive their censure for the faults of my head than of my heart.

The Wigwell Aqueduct (sometimes called the Leawood Aqueduct) has since stood the test of time, and it’s an outstanding example of the masonry-arch construction that James Brindley had pioneered at the Barton Aqueduct (1761) taking his Bridgewater Canal across the River Irwell west of Manchester.

A short walk further south along the canal stands an example of the successor to the masonry arch – the iron-trough aqueduct that Thomas Telford developed to span the wide Dee Valley at Pontcysyllte, east of Llangollen in North Wales. 

Telford showed that it was possible to carry a waterway in an iron trough at far greater height than was possible with masonry.  On the Cromford Canal, the iron-trough technique proved useful in other ways.

Twice in a decade, railway engineers needed to burrow a way under the canal for double-track railways.  In the late 1830s the North Midland Railway at Bull Bridge pierced the canal embankment to take its main line north towards Rotherham, and within ten years the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock & Midland Junction Railway needed to tunnel through Lea Wood, where the canal main line and a private branch to Lea Mills had hugged the hillside.

In each case, iron troughs in segments were fabricated at Butterley Works near Ripley and floated down the canal.  Dropping them into place and making the join watertight was accomplished in a matter of hours over Saturday night, when canal traffic could be paused, and then the embankment below was excavated and railway track laid.

The iron-trough rail arch and the original gothic road-arch at Bull Bridge were demolished in 1968.  Of the two aqueducts at Lea Wood, the one over the main line survives, and stopping trains to Matlock pass by.  The corresponding aqueduct on the Leawood branch was demolished sometime soon after the Second World War and has been replaced by a footbridge. 

Anyone seeking to understand the difference between the two types of aqueduct found on British canals need only park at the High Peak Junction car park and walk down the canal.

A short distance beyond the Leawood Aqueduct is a bijou example of the other major civil-engineering achievement of the Canal Age, the 42-yard Gregory Tunnel.

The towpath continues south as far as Ambergate, where the line of the canal was lost to a natural gas processing plant in the 1960s.

The hourly Derby-Matlock train service provides opportunities to explore the canal from Cromford, (rather than High Peak Junction), returning from Whatstandwell or Ambergate stations.

Old buffers

Mansion House Station, London Underground: hydraulic buffer stop

At the end of a platform at Mansion House Underground Station stands a strange-looking urn.

The track has been lifted from Platform 2 because all trains through the station use Platforms 1 and 3.

The buffer stop that protected the terminal track for trains reversing westward remains, however, and the “urn” indicates that it’s a fine example of a hydraulic design by the Ipswich manufacturer Ransomes & Rapier.

The vessel attached to the buffer contains water or hydraulic fluid under pressure, and is designed to resist the sudden force of a vehicle which has failed to stop.

It doesn’t need to be an ornate shape, but elegance is a hallmark of Victorian engineering.

This item of paraphernalia, ignored by the vast proportion of Underground travellers, is a piece of deep arcana that has attracted the attention of rail enthusiasts who specialise in infrastructure and it’s clear that there are or were numerous examples throughout the London Underground system and further afield.

There’s a particularly fine example at Putney Bridge Underground Stationhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/mars1940/9789182564 – and halfway across the world two others at Kalka Station in India, the interchange point between the main line from Delhi and the celebrated Kalka-Shimla railwayhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/14892851@N06/6845505378.

The Wikimedia-Commons page ‘Ransome & Rapier hydraulic buffers’ illustrates examples from many parts of the world, most of all South America – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ransomes_%26_Rapier_hydraulic_buffers – but none are as pretty as the one I found on the London Underground at Mansion House.

Two preserved railways in the UK have examples of Ransome & Rapier buffers – the Great Central Railway (Loughborough) at Leicester North and the Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust at Midsomer Norton.  

In Districtdavesforum there’s discussion about whether TfL could be persuaded to donate an example to the excellent but already crowded Ipswich Transport Museum, which is an admirable thought.

Fenchurch Street Station

Fenchurch Street Station, City of London

Fenchurch Street Station is an anomaly among London rail termini, tucked away down a back street from Fenchurch Street itself , serving only local lines as far out as Southend and Shoeburyness, and lacking any direct link to the Underground.

Its charming façade, designed by George Berkeley (1853-54), looks out on to a modest urban square and the entrance leads by lifts and escalators to four platforms at the level of the viaduct that carries the tracks.

It has a number of historic claims:  it stands on a site rich in archaeology of the Roman period;  when it opened in 1841 it boasted the first railway station bookstall, pioneered by William Marshall who supplied newspapers wholesale to the Great Western Railway;  it’s associated with the first on-train railway murder in July 1864, when Mr Thomas Briggs, aged 70, was robbed and killed on a train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney by Franz Muller, who fled to New York where he was arrested and returned to Britain, found guilty and suffered one of the last public hangings outside Newgate Prison in November 1864.

Fenchurch Street was the first railway terminus to reach within the City of London boundary, followed by Cannon Street (1863-6) serving the area south of the Thames, and Liverpool Street (1874) which became the major terminus for train services to East Anglia and beyond.

Originally built for the 3½-mile-long London & Blackwall Railway, much of which, as far as the West India Docks, was built on a brick viaduct, this isolated line was built to the unusual gauge of 5ft 0½in and neither of its termini admitted steam locomotives:  cable-hauled trains ran in by their own momentum and out again aided by a shove from the station staff.

This couldn’t last.  When other railways brought their services to Fenchurch Street the intensity of traffic necessitated steam locomotives, and the London & Blackwall was converted to the standard 4ft 8½in gauge in 1849.

After successive amalgamations the lines out of Fenchurch Street were operated by two companies, the Great Eastern Railway and the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, which was taken over by the Midland Railway in 1912.

It’s always been a busy station, though the lines it served provided uncomfortable services because of overcrowding.  Electric trains took over from steam in 1961, but the increasing weight of traffic made the old LT&SR route notorious as the “misery line”.

A major refurbishment, which entirely closed the station for seven weeks in 1994, replaced track, signals and power supply, and a further upgrade took place in 2013.

1970s plans to bring the proposed Fleet Line through Fenchurch Street came to nothing, and the scheme later opened as the Jubilee Line, eventually reaching Stratford in 1999.

Tower Hill Underground Station is a matter of minutes away, as is the Docklands Light Railway Tower Hill Station.

Discussions have taken place to expand Fenchurch Street to six platforms by taking over the site of the DLR Tower Gateway station, running DLR services into an expanded Tower Hill Underground station.

Fenchurch Street was handling around 16 million passengers a day before the pandemic, slightly less than Cannon Street.  It remains to be seen how many of those passengers return in the next few years.

Street transport nostalgia

Stagecoach Supertram no 120 (February 2013)
First South Yorkshire bus no: 37528
First South Yorkshire bus no: 37229

In 2010, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of Sheffield’s first-generation tram system, Stagecoach Supertram, its light-rail successor, repainted one of their units in a near-approximation of the distinctive Sheffield Corporation azure-blue-and-cream livery.

I sense that the blue isn’t exactly authentic, but it’s a close match and it suits the lines of the 1994 Siemens-Deuwag unit.

The livery on this tram is still a familiar sight on Sheffield’s streets over ten years later, and when the unit, no: 120, was involved in a collision with another, no: 118, in 2015, the undamaged sections of 120 were attached to the undamaged end of 118 which was repainted to match. 

Correspondingly, the two damaged ends were united and sent for repair.

The insistent nostalgia for old liveries extended to Sheffield’s buses when First South Yorkshire commemorated the centenary of bus operation in Sheffield in 2013.  Two double-deckers appeared in approximations of traditional Sheffield liveries.

One of them, no: 37229, looks well in the 1935 azure-blue-and-cream Sheffield livery, re-registered from YN08 LCJ to a more authentic plate 3910 WE belonging to a long-retired double-decker, and the visible fleet-number was truncated to 229.

The other repaint, no: 37528 (YN58 ETX), is less successful, because the contemporary Prussian-blue-and-cream tram livery was adapted for modestly-proportioned 1913 buses and it simply doesn’t fit the bulky lines of a modern double-decker.  The vehicle carries an appropriate fake fleet number 1.

The most endearing aspect of the livery on 37528 is that it carries the name of the long-serving and highly respected general manager of Sheffield Corporation Tramways, Arthur R Fearnley, who is credited with building Sheffield’s public transport system into a source of great pride in the city.  His grandson, Giles Fearnley, was Managing Director of First Bus from 2011 to 2020.

I’m intrigued that modern bus operators are making an effort to perpetuate the liveries of their predecessors.

First South Yorkshire has vehicles running around in the liveries of Rotherham Corporation [First South Yorkshire 37231, YN08LCL. | EYBusman | Flickr] and South Yorkshire Transport [First South Yorkshire 37524, YN58ETR. | EYBusman | Flickr], and Stagecoach has a single-decker in Chesterfield Corporation livery:  [Stagecoach 34720 YN05XNZ at Chesterfield | driffbus | Flickr].  A quick glance at a bus-enthusiast forum suggests this fashion is prevalent across the British Isles.

Nostalgia apart, it’s apparent that modern vehicles actually look better in heritage liveries, not simply because of the choice of colours and typography, but because up to the 1970s it never occurred to anyone to ignore the natural proportions of the bodywork. The garish colours and the swoops and swirls of some modern liveries are what Cecil Beaton, referring to the Duchess of Devonshire’s flower beds, described as a “retina irritant”.

Anhalter Bahnhof

Anhalter Bahnhof ruin, Berlin, Germany

When you emerge from the Berlin S-bahn station, Anhalter Bahnhof, you’re confronted with the vestigial remains of the late nineteenth-century inter-city main-line terminus of the same name, a reminder of a different Berlin that’s largely disappeared.

The earliest railways to reach Berlin each terminated at their own station – Postdamer Bahnhof (1838) from Potsdam and the Anhalter Bahnhof (1839) from Anhalt.   These were followed by the Frankfurter Bahnhof (1842), the Stettiner Bahnhof (1842) from Stettin (now Szczecin) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (1846-47).

The Berlin rail system went through frequent and radical realignments during the nineteenth century and the original Anhalter Bahnhof was completely and magnificently rebuilt in 1876-80 to the designs of Franz Heinrich Schwechten (1841-1924) as a major terminus under an iron-and-glass trainshed, said to be the largest in continental Europe though smaller than St Pancras.

The bombastic glazed brick façade was decorated with sculptures — figures representing Night and Day by Ludwig Brunow (1843-1913) flanking the clock, and International Traffic by Emil Hundrieser (1846-1911) crowning the central pediment.

Albert Speer’s 1930s scheme for a world capital [Welthauptstadt] called Germania to celebrate the anticipated Nazi victory in the Second World War would have severed the approach tracks to the station, which Speer proposed to convert into a swimming pool.

After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 inaugurated the Final Solution plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Anhalter Bahnhof, unlike the other Berlin stations that transported Jews in freight wagons, provided ordinary carriages with armed guards, attached to scheduled services, to give the impression that elderly Jews were being taken to a well-deserved retirement.  

The terminus was practically put out of action by Allied bombing in November 1943 and February 1945, and although the Allies restored services from 1946, the East Berlin authorities took a dim view of trains from East Germany arriving at a terminus in the American sector, and diverted all traffic to the Ostbahnhof in 1952.

The station stood empty and unused until 1960 when most of it was demolished.  In response to public protests the central portion of Schwechten’s façade was retained and cleaned.  Brunow’s statues were replaced by reproductions so that the originals could be shown at the German Museum of Technology built on former railway land nearby.

The footprint of the station platforms and tracks is occupied by an all-weather football pitch and a concert venue, Tempodrom.  Alongside, a vast bunker constructed as a shelter in 1943 houses the Berlin Story Museum, an exercise in dark tourism from which no-one emerges feeling cheerful, telling the story of twentieth-century Berlin warts and all:  www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/germany/15-countries/individual-chapters/230-anhalter-train-station-ruins-and-bunker.

Ashburton: railway station

Former Ashburton railway station, Devon (2017)

The “Birmingham Railway Mafia” has left its fingerprints all over the early history of the rail-preservation movement in Britain.

From the early 1950s such individuals as the writer Tom Rolt (1910-1974), the photographer Ivo Peters (1915-1989) and the businessman Patrick Whitehouse (1922-1993), among others, were involved in saving the Talyllyn and Ffestiniog railways in North Wales and establishing the Tyseley Railway Centre in Birmingham.

Patrick Whitehouse persuaded British Railways to sell him a former Great Western Railway locomotive for £750, and with a Talylynn colleague, Pat Garland, sought a suitable branch railway on which to run it.

They secured the Totnes-Ashburton branch line in Devon, which still had track in place, and opened what was then the Dart Valley Railway – now operating as the South Devon Railway – in 1969.

There was, however, a catch in the deal.

For two years, the rail service ran the full length of the line and locomotives were stabled at the Ashburton terminus.

In 1971, however, the Ministry of Transport exercised its right to take over the trackbed north of Buckfastleigh and use it to improve the A38 trunk road.

The heritage line was permanently cut back to Buckfastleigh station, yet the historically significant Ashburton station with its overall roof, dating back to 1872, still remains intact, fifty years after the last train left.

It’s now a garage and is well-maintained, but the surrounding land has commercial development potential that could destroy its historic significance.

The adjacent Grade-II listed goods warehouse has been converted to offices by the architects Van Ellyn & Sheryn [Ashburton Listed Conversion – van Ellen + Sheryn | RIBA Chartered Architect – Devon], but none of the other surviving railway structures are listed.

The Friends of Ashburton Station launched a detailed and ambitious scheme to convert the passenger station as a prelude to a long-term plan to reconnect with the operational railway at Buckfastleigh, but the latest news on its website is dated September 2015:  Friends of Ashburton Station.

Their Facebook page shows encouraging signs of life.  The latest post there is July 2020, in the midst of the pandemic:  Friends of Ashburton Station – Posts | Facebook.

It’s hard to tell how the railway could co-exist with the further planned improvements to the A38, but restoring a significant historic structure in the middle of Ashburton would be a benefit, and the detail of the 2015 scheme inspires confidence that the project has been carefully thought-out.

Bennerley benefactors

Bennerley Viaduct, Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire (2022)

On January 14th 2022, fifty-four years after the last train crossed Bennerley Viaduct, the “Iron Giant” reopened, providing public access to magnificent views across the Erewash Valley on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border.

This remarkable structure, built to cope with the likelihood of subsidence in a heavily mined coalfield has survived because of three lucky circumstances.

Its wrought-iron construction made demolition inordinately expensive;  the demise of most similar viaducts ensured its listing at Grade II* and, most important of all, its location near to the Derbyshire town of Ilkeston meant that local people held it in their hearts.

The novelist D H Lawrence (1885-1930), born in nearby Eastwood, mentions it repeatedly in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow.  For local youths, clambering in the girders as the trains rumbled overhead was an adolescent rite of passage.  Its distinctive shape told local travellers they were nearly home.

After the railway closed the viaduct survived a succession of vicissitudes until Sustrans, the charity which oversees the National Cycle Network, devised a scheme to fund its renovation.

When Sustrans backed away from the project in 2018, the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct worked with Railway Paths Ltd, the owner of the viaduct, to find the means to make it accessible as a community asset. 

I visited the viaduct within a week of its opening with my mate Richard, who often rides shotgun on my history explorations.

We took a train to Ilkeston Station, from where it’s an easy walk up the Erewash Canal towpath to cross the viaduct by a newly-constructed ramp at the west end and steps at the east, returning by the Nottingham Canal towpath to the station.

There must have been at least fifty people on the deck on a cold January midday, enjoying the new experience and full of curiosity.

The Friends of Bennerley Viaduct have brought long-term benefits to local people, dog-walkers, joggers and cyclists, bird-watchers and nature lovers, as well as rail enthusiasts and industrial archaeologists.

The restoration cost of £1.7 million was met in part by railway heritage organisations (the Railway Heritage Trust, Railway Paths and Railway Ramblers), national heritage organisations (Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund) and the local authority, Broxtowe Borough Council.

Richard was intrigued by the sheer variety of other charities that had contributed to the restoration, and back home he researched the less obvious ones:

© Richard Miles

  • the Charles Hayward Foundation, set up in 1961 by Sir Charles Hayward (1892-1983), a Midlands-based businessman whose engineering company Electrical & General Industrial Trusts Ltd eventually became part of the Firth Cleveland group
  • the World Monuments Fund, a New York-based non-profit organisation founded in 1965 to preserve architectural and cultural heritage sites around the world
  • the Headley Trust, a division of the Sainsbury Family Trust, which makes awards to projects both in the UK and overseas supporting causes from arts and heritage to education, health and social welfare and overseas development
  • the Pilgrim Trust, established in the UK in 1930 by an American philanthropist Edward (‘Ned’) Harkness (1874-1940), son of one of the founders of Standard Oil, and dedicated to the UK’s “most urgent needs” and for “protecting its future well-being”
  • the H B Allen Charitable Trust, founded in 1987 by Miss Heather Barbara ‘Mickie’ Allen (d 2005), a descendant of James Burrough, the founder of Beefeater Gin
  • the Sylvia Waddilove Foundation UK, a trust bequeathed by the Bradford-born textile heiress Miss Sylvia Waddilove (1911-2001) which provides grants for a variety of causes, including the preservation of buildings of architectural or historical significance

I admire the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct for three particular reasons:  they are clearly rooted in an energetic local community;  they manage mainstream and social media extremely well, and – as Richard discovered – they are adept at finding financial support from eclectic sources.

The result is, as the Friends’ spokesman Kieron Lee told the BBC, that there are Bennerley Viaduct supporters as far away as Australia, Canada and Hawaii:  Bennerley Viaduct reopens to public after £1.7m repairs – BBC News.

No-one much under seventy can now remember travelling in a train over Bennerley Viaduct, but there is footage of a journey from Derby Friargate to Nottingham Victoria shortly before the passenger service ended on September 7th 1964:  A short film of the Friargate Line – YouTube.

Additional research by Richard Miles