Somerset Coal Canal: stop lock at Dundas Aqueduct

At the southern end of Dundas Aqueduct, a branch runs from the Kennet & Avon Canal, through a curious narrow stop-lock.  Nowadays the branch ends abruptly after less than half a mile, at Brassknocker Wharf, where there is an excellent modern restaurant called the Angelfish [http://www.foodanddrinkguides.co.uk/bath/angelfish-restaurant/restaurant/2742].

This is all that remains navigable of the Somerset Coal Canal, a long-forgotten and fascinating piece of canal and railway archaeology.  It was devised by John Rennie (1761-1821), the engineer of the Kennet & Avon Canal, and surveyed by William Jessop (1745-1814) and William ‘Strata’ Smith (1769-1839), whose work is celebrated at the Rotunda Museum, Scarborough.

The original canal was built westwards to Paulton, to tap the potential traffic of the Somerset coalfield.  The first coal was brought out in 1798, though the canal itself fully opened only in 1805.

Bringing barges from the summit level 135 feet higher than the Kennet & Avon required 22 locks.  To reduce the drain on limited supplies of water, the engineer Robert Weldon proposed instead building a caisson lift at Coombe Hay, in a single operation [See http://www.coalcanal.org/history/Rowley/tLev1.htm].

This involved building a series of three 60-foot-deep cisterns, into which each barge would be floated in an airtight container – the caisson – and sunk, emerging at the foot of each lift with no loss of water at all.  [See http://www.coalcanal.org/features/Caisson/Caisson.htm and http://rtjhomepages.users.btopenworld.com/caisson-telegrap.html (which first appeared in The Daily Telegraph)].

An experimental model of this system appeared to work, but the full-sized version was unsuccessful, apparently because of geological rather than mechanical problems.

It was replaced, first by an inclined plane, and eventually – in 1805 – by a flight of locks, from which a steam pump returned water to the summit pound.

A canal branch from Radstock as far as Twinhoe was never completed:  to avoid the expense of a further flight of locks the line was built as a tramway by 1815.  This was superseded in 1875 by the Somerset & Dorset Railway line to Bath.

There was no shortage of coal traffic, but the Somerset Coal Canal was an early victim of railway competition.

Later, the bulk of the main canal between Limpley Stoke and Camerton was converted by the Great Western Railway to a standard-gauge branch-line in 1910.  This was not a commercial success, but after it closed it became the location for the celebrated Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953).

Much of the route of the Somerset Coal Canal is traceable, including the former aqueduct at Dunkerton, for seriously determined explorers to seek out.  The Somerset Coal Canal Society exists to foster interest in the route:  http://www.coalcanal.org.

Of the caisson lift hardly anything remains.  The masonry was used to build the replacement locks, and archaeological digs have revealed very little.

I wonder if there’s a working model somewhere?

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Blunsdon Station, Swindon & Cricklade Railway, Wiltshire

The Swindon & Cricklade Railway is one of the smaller volunteer efforts to preserve the age of steam.  It boasts that it’s the only standard-gauge preserved railway in Wiltshire and occupies, not part of Brunel’s former broad-gauge Great Western, but a stretch of the little-known Midland & South Western Railway, a late-comer which allowed the trains of the Midland Railway and its allies to penetrate Great Western territory to reach Southampton.  The section from Swindon through Cricklade to Cheltenham was opened in 1881.

When the Swindon & Cricklade volunteers came here there was nothing but trackbed.  Every sleeper and rail, every stick and sheet of metal has been brought here since 1978.  This is a railway that hasn’t been blessed with lottery money or large donations.

Volunteers have built two stations, Blunsdon (which last saw a passenger train in 1924), and a temporary terminus with loco- and carriage-sheds at Hayes Knoll, where additional land was available short of the ultimate destination at Cricklade.

The long-term plan is to extend southwards, diverging from the M&SWR line to a new station at Mouldon Hill Country Park and then eventually to an interchange station with the Great Western main line at Sparcells.  A northward extension to Cricklade is also planned.  The current round-trip ride is around four miles.

There is an excellent Whistlestop Café, housed in two Norwegian railway carriages, from which you can birdwatch as well as train-watch, and a rolling programme of entertaining events through the year – not only the customary Wartime Weekend and Santa Specials, but Murder Mystery Evenings and a Halloween Ghost Train.  On-board dining is provided on two beautifully spruced-up blue-and-cream Moonraker carriages.

Details of this year’s and next year’s programmes are at http://www.swindon-cricklade-railway.org.

Every cup of tea bought, and every fiver pushed into the green donations pillar-box, takes this enjoyable little railway nearer to its termini.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Avoncliff Aqueduct, Kennet & Avon Canal, Wiltshire

It’s not easy to reach Avoncliff except, of course, on a boat.

South of Bradford-on-Avon the Kennet & Avon Canal follows the narrow valley of the River Avon.  Brunel’s Great Western Railway squeezes alongside John Rennie’s waterway and there are two tiny roads on each side of the valley, with no connection across the river.

Rennie carried the canal over the river on the stately Avoncliff Aqueduct, not perhaps his best advertisement because the sixty-foot main arch sagged very shortly after it was finished in 1798, yet it has stood ever since.

As early as 1803 heavy repairs were needed.  It seems that Rennie’s advice to use brick was disregarded to retain the goodwill of local quarry-owners who would bring trade to the completed canal.

In the course of restoring the entire canal, the aqueduct was made securely watertight with a concrete bed in 1980.

It’s not a good idea to take a car down the valley, especially on summer weekends.  Indeed, it’s inadvisable to take anything much bigger for lack of turning space.  There is a railway station, with a two-hour service between Bristol, Bath and Bradford-on-Avon, which is particularly useful if you want to walk the couple of miles along the canal from Bradford-on-Avon and then ride back.

Once you reach Avoncliff it’s a pleasant spot to while away the hours.  There’s an excellent historic pub, the Cross Guns [http://www.crossguns.net], which provides meals and refreshments, and usually something passing by along the canal.

This was not the case between the wars when, according to Kenneth Clew, the canal’s historian, most of the tolls collected at Bradford-on-Avon were cycle permits.  The toll-book also records a shilling toll “for carrying a corpse across the aqueduct at Avoncliff”.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Didcot Railway Centre, Oxfordshire

Didcot Railway Centre [http://www.didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk] celebrates the Great Western Railway – known to its aficionados as “God’s Wonderful Railway” and to its weary Victorian customers as the “Great Way Round”.  The Centre is built round the 1932 engine shed, itself a remarkable piece of social and transport history, funded in the midst of the Depression by a National government desperate to reduce unemployment by priming cash-strapped private enterprise.

The engine shed has much of the patina of a working loco depot, with odd nooks and crannies in which engineering wizards deal in steel, brass and oil while brewing strong tea and putting the world to rights.

The GWR Chief Mechanical Engineer at the start of the twentieth century, George Jackson Churchward, developed standardised features in locomotive design so successfully that his signature can be seen in the locomotives of the LMS Railway, those of his pupil Sir William A Stanier, and in the final series of post-war British Railways designs by Stanier’s own pupils.

Immediately recognisable features of Churchward’s designs – tapered boilers, copper-capped chimneys and brass valve-cases – meant that Great Western engines were among the most elegant on British railways.

Didcot proudly shows more than twenty of these magnificent locomotives, and Churchward’s use of standard components means that the Great Western Society can reconstruct long-vanished designs to complete the sequence.  Whereas the LNER A1 locomotive Tornado had to be constructed expensively from scratch, the GWS plans to reproduce a ‘Saint’ from a ‘Hall’, and a ‘County’ from another ‘Hall’ using an LMS boiler.

The Centre astutely makes a virtue of its limitations:  its two short branch-lines offer frequent out-and-back steam-train rides “so there is always something to watch”.  The publicity-material makes the point that all train-rides are in vintage carriages not (as in some Johnny-come-lately steam railways) using late-1960s stock from the age of diesel, and visitors have freedom of movement to explore such features as a working turntable, a reproduction broad-gauge track and train and a surviving example of Brunel’s atmospheric railway track.

For nearly ten years, museum development at Didcot was held back by uncertainties over the lease for the site, until October 2011, when the Centre obtained a further fifty-year lease from Network Rail.

The Centre stands at the apex of a junction between the GWR lines from Paddington to Swindon and Oxford.  That is the point of the place:  it provides the sounds and smells of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century rail travel while twenty-first century trains whizz past on either side.

There’s an echo of this contiguity in Kensal Green Cemetery, where lie both Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who virtually invented the Great Western, and his great friend and rival, Robert Stephenson, son of George, within earshot of trains which still speed on opposite sides of the cemetery from Paddington and from Euston.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.