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Discovering Britain’s Lost Railways by Paul Atterbury
Discovering Britains Lost Railways by Paul Atterbury
Hard Cover w/ dust jacket
160 pages
Copyright 1995
CONTENTS
Introduction By Jimmy Knapp 6
Across The Pennines To The Lakes 8Darlington To Penrith Penrith To Cockermouth
Tarka Country 24Halwill Junction To Barnstaple Barnstaple To Ilfracombe Lynton To Barnstaple
The Slow And Dirty 38Bath Green Park To Templecombe
Ticket To Ryde 56Ryde To Ventnor And Brading To Bembridge Newport To Cowes Newport To Freshwater Newport To Smallbrook Junction
In And Around The Potteries 72Uttoxeter To North Rode Stoke-On-Trent To Cauldon The Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway
Norfolk Horizons 86Norwich To Cromer Via Melton Constable Melton Constable To Yarmouth Beach
The Atlantic Coast 100Okehampton To Bude Halwill Junction To Wadebridge Padstow To Wadebridge And Bodmin Bodmin To Wenford Bridge
The Wilds Of Wales 114Ruabon To Barmouth Junction Blaenau Ffestiniog To Bala Junction
The North Yorkshire Coast 130Saltburn-By-The-Sea To Whitby Whitby To Scarborough
The Irish Mail 142Castle Douglas To Stranraer And Portpatrick Newton Stewart To Whithorn
INTRODUCTION
The earliest railways 'in Britain were built in the north of England, reflecting the industrial importance of this part of the country. There was no plan for a national network, and lines were built in isolation and usually for a particular flow of traffic, such as coal or other minerals. After the initial burst of building, which lasted through to the middle of the nineteenth century, the network remained relatively unchanged for 100 years until the 1960s, when wholesale cuts were made under the Beeching reorganisation.
You need to be into middle age, therefore, to remember the time when it was possible to reach every reasonably sized town by rail, and when most villages were but a short bus journey from a railway station. What this book helps to bring home is the sheer scale of the railway network that existed before Beeching. The surviving embankments, cuttings and bridges also underline the feats of engineering involved in building railways in the nineteenth century.
Line closures were not unknown in the days of the private companies, and this process continued after nationalisation in 1948. But the closure programme accelerated hugely under the Beeching reorganisation, when about one third of the network disappeared. It is beyond argument that the Beeching axe cut too deep. A survey of rural communities some twenty years after Beeching found there was still considerable anger in these communities over the loss of the rail link.
On the other hand, when visiting the site of some of the closed lines today it is easy to ask `Why on earth did they build a line here?' Most were built to service a local industry, long since gone. But did the closure of the line lead to the death of the community or did the community disappear first, leaving the line without a reason for existence?
The importance of railways to rural communities lay not only in the contact they provided with the outside world, but also in the carriage of freight, including a range of farm produce. As a young railwayman, I recall one of the more pleasurable jobs on my line was to take fresh salmon, delivered by train, to the local hotel. A wee dram for your trouble at the end of the shift ensured that prompt delivery continued!
It is natural to look back on this period with more than a whiff of nostalgia. Yet in railway terms the pre-war times and the 1940s and 50s were a world apart from today.
As a young signalman in the early 1960s, I worked on the Ayr to Glasgow line and was made redundant four times when lines such as Dalry to Kilmarnock and Hurlford to Darvel were closed. The biggest change since Beeching has come in technological advance. At the time I worked the line there were more than thirty signal boxes between Ayr and Glasgow. Modern signalling means that these boxes have been replaced by just one.
Finding the site of an old railway station is usually straightforward for the experienced eye if the station building remains. Far more difficult is to pick out the site of old signal boxes. On the old-fashioned branch lines which even in pre-war days had only a limited service, signal boxes often had well-cultivated plots of land adjacent to them where the signalman, undervalued and underpaid even then, might spend an hour or two growing vegetables to help balance the household budget.
I have to confess that public fascination with railways never ceases to surprise me. Book follows book and video seems to follow video, each covering yet another aspect of railways. The truth, of course, as exemplified by this excellent book, is that the history of railways is far more than a chronology of lines opening and closing, or of advances - or failures - in engineering. Railways changed the world. As the Duke of Wellington reportedly said, expressing his disapproval: `They encourage the lower classes to travel about.' The Iron Duke was certainly right about that!
The development of railways is an industrial, economic and social story of change and evolution, as we still see today. Perhaps I can illustrate this by mentioning that the rough draft of this introduction to a book on our forgotten railways was prepared on Eurostar, hurtling through the Channel Tunnel.
Puxton & Worle, Midsomer Norton, Evercreech and Wookey are names of stations, which, as the author eloquently states, are `an anthem to the interwoven layers of England's cultural history'. Yesterday's railway perhaps, but, with the help of this book, not quite forgotten. The future will echo to a different song of praise, although the railway culture of Eurostar, Waterloo, Lille, Brussels and Paris still has its roots in our lost railways.
Jimmy Knapp General SecretaryNational Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers 1995
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