Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill

This is not so much about railways, but about an area I knew well which a railway ran through.  

I was on the Rawcliffe bus with my mother, looking across the fields at a nearby metal bridge. It was a bright, sunny day, long before I started school. She would not yet have been 30. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” I asked. 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

A few minutes later I asked again. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

I asked three or four times. A woman in the seat opposite looked at us and smiled.

The bridge carried the Goole to Selby railway line across the River Aire near Rawcliffe. It was a similar structure to Boothferry Bridge, but that is a road bridge across the River Ouse a couple of miles downstream. I had probably just learnt its name. 

On 21st May, I included this evocative picture of a rather ancient train arriving at Goole around 1960. More recently, I mentioned the Flanders and Swann song “The Slow Train”, which contains the line “No one departs and no one arrives, From Selby to Goole, from St. Erth to St. Ives.” 

It turns out that the train pictured is the very same Selby to Goole train. It travelled back and forth between the two towns for much of the day, and was sometimes called “the Goole and Selby Push and Pull” because it ran tender-first in one direction, so did not need to turn round. You can find pictures of the same engine and coaches at the Selby end. 

That railway holds some of my earliest memories. Although I travelled on the line only once, the bridge, the railway track, and the area nearby form a backdrop to my childhood. I passed often and always looked out for them. 

My one trip on the line was when, still very young, Dad took me to see the powerful East Coast Main Line locomotives that then passed through Selby. I suspect he wanted to see them more than I did. 

The Goole to Selby route was a single line track, about 10 miles long. I learnt the station names: Goole, Airmyn and Rawcliffe, Drax Hales, Barlow, and Selby. I remember being fascinated as Dad explained how the drivers had to possess a token to enter each section of track, and watching the tokens being handed over by the signalmen. Tokens were like large metal keys, with sturdy wire loops so they could be handed arm to arm, with minimal risk of drops. There was only one token for each length of track, which meant that successive trains had to travel in opposite directions. I think there were two sections of track, with a changeover point half way to allow trains to pass. The driver and signalman had to swap two tokens simultaneously without stopping, giving one and receiving one, not an easy procedure. When we went, trains were still steam hauled before diesel multiple units were brought in.

The line pretty much bisected Goole and Rawcliffe by Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, where the road ran over the railway. It was a local landmark, the countryside being so flat. I passed at least once a week. 

I liked the big lorries that came over the hill through Rawcliffe from the West to call at the nearby Woodside Café. At times, there could be 20 from all over the country parked there. Even after the M62 was built, drivers made the short detour to call in. 

Mum liked to walk to the adjacent Bluebell Wood from which it took its name, to see and pick the abundant bluebells. We did not know better then. I remember going on another warm sunny day, also pre-school, past the distinctive Glews Garage, and the row of houses known as White City that were built for returning war veterans.

Airmyn and Rawcliffe station was next to the hill. For a time, Dad had a customer who lived in one of the station cottages. I liked to sit and wait for him when he took me to Grandma’s. “What a fantastic place to live,” I thought. Around the same time, my mother’s sister and her husband rented a smallholding nearby across the main road. I liked visiting there too. They had cows and chickens. 

This is Airmyn and Rawcliffe station in the early 1960s. The stations were all made of wood. 

Working late one Friday night in a thunderstorm in the dark, Dad arrived home very shaken. He had pulled up in his van behind a car that had stalled half way up Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, and was immediately hit from behind by another van that had failed to stop in time. He eventually made it home with the rear of his van smashed in, its contents ruined, and a painful back. I think it was one of the reasons he decided to retire a year or two later.  

Even after the railway closed completely, Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill remained for many years, with a tricky bend in the middle and the empty track bed running underneath. I became quite skilled at drifting round the bend in my Mini Van without slowing down. Eventually, the road was levelled, but the local landmark remained beside the new section of road, still with a tricky bend, empty track bed, and silent and unused railway bridge across the fields. 

The Goole to Selby Line had only a short life; in fact, it has now been closed longer than it existed. It opened in 1910 and closed in 1964 as part of the Beeching cuts. It never attracted the expected goods traffic, and passenger numbers were low. 

This football special for Selby Town supporters travelling to a match against Goole during the 1950s was an exception. Those were the days when if you needed a longer train, you just got more coaches out of the carriage sidings. 

Much of the track has now been taken over by the A645 from Goole to Drax and Selby, which uses the railway bridge, and cuts about 8 miles off the previous route via Rawcliffe and Snaith. All that remains of the site of Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill is a roundabout. The station cottages are still there, but unrecognisable. Unless you know, you would never imagine there had ever been a station there or any railway at all. Glews Garage stood prominently just off the M62 for many years, with its name on the roof in large red lettering, but has now gone, and White City is no longer white. It is good to see the Woodside Café still in business beside the wood, but few lorries stop there now, and I suspect there are no more bluebells.  

I still look for all of them, though. 

The Restless Friend

New Month Old Post: first posted 22nd January, 2017

From Great Heck and the Norfolk Broads to Southern Rhodesia: the contrasting lives of childhood friends.

High on the mantelpiece in the back room of the house where I grew up, were photographs of my mother and father taking turns to wear a ships’ officer’s hat at the wheel of a houseboat on the Norfolk Broads. My dad’s pipe is jauntily raked at an angle that would not have been out of place in someone commanding a much larger vessel. He puts on a show of self-importance while my mum looks relaxed and happy. How young and carefree they seem; from a time before I was born. 

My dad remembered this post-war holiday fifty years later. They went with his school friend Freddy and wife Sylvia. My mum, Freddy and Sylvia went on ahead because Dad had to work the first Saturday. He took his suitcase in the firm’s van and was dropped off at Heck railway station, between Selby and Doncaster, where he took a direct train to Norwich. He remembered the splendid sight of Ely Cathedral in the evening sun. He was young, the war was over and he was off on holiday with his new wife and friends: for all of them the future was rosy. 

You might be surprised to learn there was ever a direct train from Heck to Norwich, but during the war the tiny station at Great Heck gained unusual importance due to its proximity to No. 51 Heavy Bomber Squadron, R.A.F. Snaith, a short distance along a country lane between Heck and nearby Pollington. Also at Pollington were army barracks and one of the largest Women’s Land Army quarters in the country. Some 3,200 extra personnel were drafted into a village of 650. My dad’s train was a residual wartime service. He actually caught it on the very last Saturday it ran.

Great Heck has no railway station at all now. It disappeared around nineteen-sixty along with its neighbours at Temple Hirst, Balne and Moss. My dad once took me there in the nineteen-fifties to watch powerful Atlantic and Pacific locomotives race through non-stop on the East Coast Main Line between York and Doncaster. By then the station had already declined into obscurity and might never have been heard of again had it not been the site of the terrible Great Heck rail crash in February, 2001. Even that is often referred to as the Selby rail crash.

Pollington Airfield has also gone. A few derelict hangars remain but the runways and taxiways have all but crumbled and the site is used now by haulage and storage companies. For much of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies it was a popular off-road spot for learner drivers to make their first juddering attempts at starting, steering, stopping and changing gear.

Back in the photographs, it is Freddy’s cap they are wearing. On leaving school he had initially begun to train as a ship’s officer, but wartime on the ominous North Atlantic convoys had left him restless. He exchanged his sextant for the cricket team and a job in a railway office. The drudgery was too much. While my dad remained in his small Yorkshire town, Freddy left for the champagne air of colonial Southern Rhodesia, seeking excitement and adventure over caution and insularity. Sylvia followed soon after with their two young children. That is what wives did in those days whether or not they really wanted to. 

They left in 1952 and lived very comfortably for a time. Whites in Rhodesia had servants, sizeable houses with pleasant gardens and swimming pools, and good health care and education. The climate was wonderful and it was one of the richest communities in the world. I don’t know whether Freddy ever came back. Online ships’ manifests only show Sylvia and the children spending five months in Yorkshire without Freddy in 1955, but the records are incomplete.

What I do remember is that each Christmas Freddy sent my dad a subscription to the Reader’s Digest. My dad thought it the affected urbanity of a smug high-flier and was irritated by the complacent, patronising content. But children have time to read such things: the features such as ‘Laughter the Best Medicine’, ‘Humour in Uniform’, ‘Life’s Like That’ and ‘Test Your Word Power’, the biographies and articles on technology and medicine, the condensed books. I still, for old time’s sake, go straight to the piles of back-issues in holiday cottages and waiting rooms. Thankfully my word power fairs better now. It is easy to see why it was once one of the highest-circulation periodicals in the world, despite all the junk mail that comes with it.

The gift subscription continued into the nineteen-sixties despite nothing ever being sent back in return, not even a Christmas card, as we did not know Freddy’s address. It may have been in Bulawayo. One year the subscription stopped. Perhaps he had decided not to bother any more. We gradually forgot about it. It was a long time before we heard what had happened.

Two decades later, Sylvia unexpectedly returned to England, alone and penniless. It transpired that Freddy, clever with money, had made a small fortune on the stock market, but had also developed an alcohol problem. Eventually, he left and moved to Hong-Kong where he later died. Sylvia had remained in Rhodesia (by then Zimbabwe) until, forced by the economic and political situation there, she returned to Yorkshire. She had not been allowed to bring any money out of the country. She came back to be near her daughter, but her daughter died fairly soon afterwards. Sylvia spent the rest of her days in our small Yorkshire town on benefits in a bedsit, surrounded by second-hand furniture. She was too proud to accept offers of help, even though my parents, who had not moved away, had become fairly comfortably off. 

I guess, as these events are long past and the people long gone, it is all right to post these pictures of Freddy and Sylvia (one with my dad). 

Flanders and Swann

Who remembers Michael Flanders and Donald Swann? They wrote and sang comic songs and appeared as guests on TV shows in the 1960s. Flanders sat in a wheelchair due to Poliomyelitis, and Swann sat at the piano. 

Their best remembered song has to be “The Hippopotamus”, with its chorus “Mud, mud, glorious mud”. They had great fun with words. The lengthened ‘a’ in “the Hippopotamus” to rhyme with “was no ignoramus” still amuses me. Another song I remember is “The Gnu” (with a hard ‘g’), “spelt G-N-U-”.  

Michael Flanders wrote and sang most of the words and delivered comic monologues, and Donald Swann wrote the music and played piano. You could easily assume that Flanders, a large, impressive, bearded man with a rich voice, was the act, and the slighter and quieter Swann was merely the accompanist, but the music was every bit as important as the words. Donald Swann wrote catchy tunes and was an accomplished musician.  

I especially like “The Slow Train” about the 1963 Beeching cuts, and its litany of quirky station names: Blandford Forum, Mortehoe, Littleton Badsey, Dog Dyke, .... The way the halting rhythm of the music captures the halting rhythm of a labouring steam locomotive is delightful. Not only that, the song mentions a certain Yorkshire town.  

https://youtu.be/U6OHD2uCpfU

Miller′s Dale for Tideswell ...
Kirby Muxloe ...
Mow Cop and Scholar Green ...

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street
We won't be meeting again
On the Slow Train.

I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more
No whitewashed pebbles, no up and no down
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town
I won't be going again
On the Slow Train.

On the Main Line and the goods′ siding
The grass grows high
At High Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside
And Trouble House Halt, the sleepers sleep.

At Audlem and Ambergate no passenger waits
On Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay
No one departs, no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives
They′ve all passed out of our lives
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

Cockermouth for Buttermere ...
On the Slow Train, Armley Moor Arram ...
Pye Hill and Somercotes ...
On the Slow Train
Windmill End.

Signal Boxes

Another of my railway books. It would be hard to out-nerd me on this one: Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Traffic Control Maps, Volume 3 Yorkshire 1895, by T. T. Sutcliffe. It is a book of sketch maps and other details about signal boxes on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. 

It is mainly maps and tables. One of the simplest maps is of our local line between Shepley and Penistone. To the North, it continues to Huddersfield, and in the opposite direction from Penistone, after initially turning West, it continues South and East to Sheffield Victoria or Barnsley. 

At Penistone we can also see the junction to the Woodhead Tunnel route to Manchester, which closed to passengers in 1970, and completely in 1981. The Yorkshire section is now a cycle path, and trains between Penistone and Sheffield are diverted through Barnsley, increasing the journey time from about 15 minutes to an hour. Sheffield Victoria railway station is also now no more. 

The map also shows the branch to Clayton West which as well as passengers, also carried coal. Building a tunnel on the line involved shattering large quantities of slate at Skelmanthorpe, which is still known locally as Shat. The branch line closed in 1983, and the track bed is now used by the volunteer-run narrow-gauge Kirklees Light Railway, a tourist attraction. 

The book contains few photographs, and the few there are make the book even more esoteric because they are all of signal box architecture. One shows the Clayton West Junction box which is close to the top of the sketch map. According to the text, this box is of interest because of the unusual design of the eaves. The Note 8 referred to, gives details of the original designer. I told you it was nerdy. To find images of wider interest you have to look on the internet. 

As well as the maps, the book lists all signal boxes (or cabins as the author prefers to call them) in the region, together with statistics such as their sizes and the number of levers they contain. The map symbols mark bridges, tunnels, level crossings, water troughs, and other features. Signal boxes are named and shown as a circled cross. 

The book also covers other lines I know well: such as around Huddersfield and Leeds, and the journey I used to make regularly between Goole and Leeds through Rawcliffe, Snaith, Knottingly, and Methley Junction when I first started work. Some maps are much more complicated, such as Wakefield. Mainly for my own interest, here is the Goole page. 

But instead of more signal box maps and images, I would rather show this enormous and incredible mural (widely available on the internet) at Manchester Victoria station, which shows the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway network from Liverpool to Hull. It is thought to date from 1904. How’s that for a Monday mural, Andrew in Melbourne (High Riser)? Enlarged (open in new tab), the whole network can be made out clearly.  

I also like the lists of shipping destinations, especially from Goole. The railway company had its own fleet of Lancashire and Yorkshire steamers, nicknamed the “Lanky Boats”. Goole was once around the tenth busiest port in the country (by tonnage), and a small crowd used to assemble each tide time on the Lock Hill to see the ships coming up and going away. 

This is Volume 3 of 4, Yorkshire 1895. Volumes 1 and 2 are Lancashire 1895 and 1922, and Volume 4 is Yorkshire 1922.They were published in the early 1980s. It must truly have been a labour of love, and I can only admire the creator of something so focused and detailed.  

Please Help The Children

Among my oldest photographs is this fascinating image, probably from 1907. The pretty girl marked with an X is my lovely grandma, or Nanna as we called her, who would then have been 11 or 12. I previously wrote about her here.  

I do not know the names of the others in the picture. The surly young lad lounging suspiciously against the wall behind them would probably be questioned these days, but that is just how ordinary people would have looked in their working clothes then. 

Like her father and many others at that time, Nanna was an active churchgoer: Methodists. The group are collecting for charity: the placard shows pictures of impoverished children, some with crutches, and says “Twelve branches - London, Provinces, Canada” followed by the names of clergymen. “Please help the children to-day”. The light-coloured box appears to say “Children’s Home Appeal 1907”. 

I can identify the location precisely. This second picture, also from the early 20th century, shows it to be at the top of the underpass - we called it the subway - outside Goole railway station. I am informed that the chimney in the background was that of Short’s ginger beer factory in Pasture Road, long gone. 

The pub on the far left is The Station Hotel. This can be seen more clearly in these two later photographs from the 1950s or 1960s judging by the cars. In one, the wall inside the top of the subway is visible. There was also another subway at the other side of the road. Pedestrians did not always use them, though. 

Together, the photographs identify the location of my grandma’s group beyond doubt. 

Today, the subways remain, but the railway station (I refuse to call it a train station) has been rebuilt, the sidings and goods yard sanitised and pedestrianised, and the railway gates replaced by half-barriers. The Station Hotel, a scene of my misspent youth, has been converted into flats. The part of the wall where the young lad stood remains, but beyond, where my grandma’s group were, has been demolished. 

No one from the 1907 picture can still be alive. My grandma died aged 58 in 1954. She would have been a strong positive influence; she was caring, intelligent, easy to talk with, and full of sound advice. Her mother died in 1910 when she was 13, she lost friends during the First World War when she was in service in Southport, Lancashire, she brought my father through polio and his sister through rheumatic fever which left her with a heart condition, and lived through the Second World War. Apart from possibly a couple of quite distant cousins, I am now the only one who can directly remember her, and they are only vague impressions. 

Lastly I ask - now old and chill -
If aught of her remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark. 

Switzerland 1975

What we were supposed to be able to see was this: 

The 8,000 foot (2,400m) Bunderchrinde Pass between Adelboden and Kandersteg was one of the highlights, but not as we expected. We should have been able to look back to the sunny Adelboden valley and its surrounding peaks, and ahead to the main chain of the Bernese Alps and mountains. 

What we actually got was this; it was the 23rd August. 

The idea was pretty audacious, arrogant even. Having backpacked across Rannoch Moor in Scotland, following a line on a map, carrying our tents and equipment, we thought we would do the same across the Swiss Alps. Five of us caught the train to Gstaad to walk the fifty or so miles to Grindelwald. 

No one had heard of the Via Alpina then, or any other long distance trails; or at least we hadn’t. And except near the Eiger and Jungfrau, there were no signposts or footpaths as now. It was map and compass, following our own route. We had a real sense of adventure. I remember spending days poring over maps to work out start and end points accessible by train. There were no other walkers in the wilder parts. It would be very different now. Despite the awful weather, we think it was one of the best trips we did. We still talk about it. 

We especially remember the humour. I could recount so many things: such as how we were plagued by the mountain pigs and cattle. We collected wood to build fires, but it did not keep them away. The pigs kept trying to get in the tent, and a cow ran off with Neville’s special private bad of Gold Blend instant coffee. He had to make to with Maxwell House like the rest of us. Dudule, who takes great delight in teasing Neville mercilessly, got the blame for years. He says that by now there must be a whole herd of Alpine cows that will eat only Gold Blend and nothing less. At Lenk, we escaped to an isolated hay loft for the night. 

The weather for the first few days was not too bad, but then it changed. When we reached Adelboden, we spent a planned rest day on the mountain, and walked behind the ice. Gavin, later a vet, and Kev, about to become a geography and geology teacher, kept us informed about the plants, insects, and geology. As Neville waved his pipe in response, the stem flew off and fell into a crevasse. But he is nothing if not well organised, and had thought to bring spare bits. He had been smoking that same pipe for years. It had had four new bowls and three new stems, but it was still the same pipe he had been smoking for years.  

Then the heavens opened. We sheltered from heavy rain all day behind a hut. My unusual capacity to do absolutely nothing for hours came in useful that day. Soaked through, we gave up and booked into a hostel, and dried out in front of a roaring fire. Kev was not happy that some cooked meat in his rucksack began to smell awful and turn green. It pervaded all else in there for several days.  

We set off for Kandersteg over the Bunderchrinde pass. “For expert hikers only”, guides now say, but Kev, who is pretty good at mountaincraft, kept us safe. As we climbed it began to snow heavily, but we reasoned that snow is not as wet as rain. We reached Kandersteg and booked into another hostel for two nights. It is untrue that snow is not as wet as rain. 

Kleine Scheideg: the man with the stick demonstrates how
to move pigs, cows and Neville (just out of the picture).

Hopelessly behind schedule, we took the train to Lauterbrunnen, walked up to Wengen, and camped. The Swiss mountain railways are incredible. After another train to Kleine Scheideg we made our way to the Eiger foothills where we camped again. I doubt you could put your tent anywhere you wanted now as we could then. 

Like Chris Bonington, whose mountaineering books I soaked up, I have climbed on the North Face of the Eiger - well, the first 100 feet (30m) of it. 

Our time up, we made our way to Grindelwald and a series of trains home. The train north along the French border was interminable, about ten hours, but I can still list most of the places where it stopped: Basel, Mulhouse, Metz, Lille, ...

Some more pictures:

Coal

Last week’s pictures of coal imported through Immingham docks to keep our last blast furnaces at Scunthorpe operative, bring home to me how much Britain and our heavy industries have changed over the last forty years. The furnaces were within days of running out of raw materials and going cold. Once that happens they are damaged beyond repair, and cannot be re-started, and Britain would have lost its ability to manufacture its own steel. The government had to step in at the last minute to save this strategic industry after the duplicitous Chinese owners, rather than buying more supplies as they claimed, had actually been selling stocks off. Goodness knows what it is going to cost us all. I come back to the economics later, below.  

We never used to import coal. In fact, we exported it. My home town owes its very existence to that. It only came into existence in 1826. 

In the eighteenth century, industrial goods from central and south Yorkshire were transported to the Rivers Ouse and Humber along the River Aire to Airmyn, and later by canal to the River Ouse at Selby. But as loads became bigger, and coastal ships larger, these twisting rivers became increasingly difficult to navigate. A new canal directly to the Ouse from Knottingley was proposed, bypassing Selby. This opened in 1826, and the brand new port and town of Goole was built at the eastern end where it joined the Ouse. It eventually carried millions of tons of Yorkshire coal for British and continental markets. Before the First World War, Goole was one of the ten busiest ports in Britain by tonnage. 

By my early childhood in the nineteen-fifties, there was an extensive network of docks, with ships trading goods of all kinds to ports throughout Britain and Europe. The town throbbed and echoed to the sounds of the ships, docks, and railways. 

Tom Puddings

Coal reached Goole by two methods. One was the canal, which used a system of compartment boats known as Tom Puddings pulled by tugs, introduced in the nineteenth century. One tub could tow a train of up to nineteen Tom Puddings, a load of nearly 800 tons. At Goole, hydraulic coal hoists raised Tom Puddings into the air and emptied them straight into the holds of ships. It made an unforgettable noise. 

One of the five coal hoists. This is a still from a short (2½ min)
Vimeo video of it in operation: https://vimeo.com/135597884

Ouse Dock in the 1930s

The second way coal reached Goole was by railway. Again, wagons full of coal could be emptied straight into a ship’s hold by crane or hoist. They could also be winched up an incline and tipped from a high-level coal drop at the dockside. 

The high-level coal drop in Railway Dock in 1988, by then disused

Coal wagons near the engine sheds, 1967

During my childhood, you could watch the hoists from close quarters. You could go almost anywhere on the docks. My dad used to take me to watch ‘Tide Time’ when ships arrived from abroad. You saw them swing round on their anchors in the river, manoeuvre to the quayside and edge into the lock. You could stand right at the edge looking down into the terrifyingly powerful turbulence from the sluice gates. You could follow ships to their berths and watch them load and unload. You saw coal wagons and Tom Puddings moved to the coal hoists and emptied into ships, and watched the ships leave the locks as the tide turned, engines pounding against the currents. Now, except for a footpath across the docks which the port authority tried hard to close, the public has no access at all. 

Reportedly, even if the steel plant at Scunthorpe is saved, we will still need to import large amounts of steel from countries like Spain, France, Germany, and Sweden to build our naval vessels, but at least it would be a start. It would be nice to think one day we will have our own electric furnaces, but as always now, we would no doubt be seeking foreign funding. We used to own all our own assets and infrastructure. Now we pay dividends and interest on it, mostly overseas. Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution! Has globalisation gone too far?

What I don’t understand is this. If we have to burn coal to keep our steel production going, then why do we need to import it? Ex-miners tell me, although Britain’s mines are closed, there are still mountains of coal buried beneath the ground, especially here in Yorkshire. Would it cost too much to re-open one, or open a new one in Cumbria as has been proposed? It seems to me that if you are going to burn the filthy stuff, it makes little difference to the environment whether it is imported or mined here. The same with buying North Sea gas from Norway when we could be extracting more of our own. 

I suppose in the long run, if left in the ground, it reduces what anyone anywhere can burn over the decades, but isn’t that just self-righteous self-sacrifice? We might as well use our own. It would surely be far less costly.

 

For  more about Tom Puddings (and there is lots) a good source is https://www.goole-on-the-web.org.uk/vol1/tom-puddings.html - the pdf link at the end of it is good, too.

Trainspotting

My first trainspotting book: Ian Allan ABC of British Railways Locomotives, Part 4 Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish Regions, Nos. 60000-99999, Summer 1959 Edition. 

It was my dad who first showed me the excitement of trains: they were all steam then; all that living and breathing weight and size. We went to the end of the platform, and he walked down the ramp and put a halfpenny on the track. The first train that came past squashed it smooth and flat, as big as a half-crown. It was one of the ways he entertained me on his Thursday half-days off. I would be about 5 or 6. 

There were smelly, express fish trains from Hull to London. You learned to stand well clear as they hurtled through, splashing fishy-smelling water all around. There were dirty goods vans and coal wagons, and sometimes a guards van of racing pigeons would arrive for release on the platform. In contrast, the Hull arm of the Yorkshire Pullman was luxurious in its umber and cream livery, shaded tables, and named coaches. It allowed businessmen two hours in London before returning, dining on the train both ways. It was bound initially for Doncaster where it joined with the Leeds arm. What a slick operation that must have been. 

   

Goole c1960 (from FBCCine on YouTube) (no sound)

A bit older, I would go to the station with friends. I showed them the coin trick. Nobody bothered you. You could stay all afternoon. 

About two hundred yards south of the station was another great place, the “Monkey Bridge”. No one seems to remember why it is so named, but possibly it was because originally the sides were made of strips of metal, which made people walking across look like monkeys climbing through trees.  

Three pairs of tracks ran beneath, the main lines to Doncaster and Wakefield, and the branch to the docks. Standing on the Monkey Bridge, you would see the railway gates open for a train in the station, see the smoke of the locomotive as it started to move, and then stand in the smoke as it passed beneath you, hair and clothes full of smuts. 

At the end of the platform. "Nottinghamshire" bound for Hull.

I liked to see the 4-4-0 D49 County or Hunt Class locomotives from Hull shed, named after counties and famous fox hunts: e.g. Nottinghamshire, The Derwent. They were shorter and more suited to the bends on the line than the more impressive 4-6-2 engines. We felt deprived not to have those, but we were better off than many. We did not realise how fortunate we were. 

For the bigger engines, you had to go to Selby station. Again, my dad took me there first, but later I rode the twelve miles there with friends by bicycle. You would not allow 12-year-olds to ride that busy road on bicycles now. 

Freight train entering Selby Station across the swing bridge.
Ben Brooksbank, Geograph.

Selby was then on the East Coast Main Line between Doncaster and York. Because of a swing bridge over the river at the end of the station, trains had to slow down to forty miles an hour, which gave you a good view of even the straight-through expresses. The ultimate was to see one of the streamlined ‘Streaks’, like Mallard. I think Bittern was the first I saw. 

The “Mess” (short for LMS), around a quarter of a mile south of the Monkey Bridge, was another good place. We named it so because of an ancient metal London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) noticeboard warning about the dangers. So many summer afternoons we spent there waiting in the hot sun. The fence smelled of creosote. It was where trains from Leeds and the engine sheds were held to give priority to the London to Hull trains. Sometimes they would be held for more than ten minutes. I know because on Fridays in later years I would be on it, and my uncle would be on the London train. If he saw me he would thumb his nose through the window as he went through first. 

Through the 1960s we began to see more and more diesels, and I had to buy a book for those. At first it was mainly multiple units, and then locomotives. But, again, for the big ones, the ‘Deltics’, you needed to be at Selby. The first I saw was named Pinza. 

Sadly, the platform where my dad took me has been shortened and there is no direct London service. The carriage sidings are filled with houses, and the goods yard once piled with coal, with cars. Selby is a shadow of its former self, no longer on the East Coast Main Line which was diverted in the 1980s. Only trains to Hull now cross the swing bridge. Trainspotting is not what it was. 

Goole Station c1960, with the Monkey Bridge in the distance

Road To The Isles

New Month Old Post: first posted 2nd June, 2016

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go

As step I wi’ my cromack to the Isles.

Rannoch Moor fires the imagination with mystery and romance: the myths and legends; the forgotten history; the departed people; the abandoned ruins; the strange Gaelic names.

Said to be one of the last remaining wildernesses in Europe, it is a bleak stretch of blanket bog, lochans and rocky outcrops to the West of Loch Rannoch in Scotland. The West Highland Railway crosses it on the way to Fort William and Mallaig, over peaty terrain so wet that the Victorian engineers had to float the track on a mattress of brushwood, earth and ashes to stop it sinking into the bog.

Other than by train, the only way to Rannoch Station is by thirty miles of narrow B road meandering along the northern shore of Loch Rannoch from Pitlochry or Aberfeldy. Neville, Kev, and I, had driven there the previous Easter to sit cheerfully swigging our pints outside the Moor of Rannoch Hotel in the warm April sunshine. We watched a goods train rumble slowly north across the Rannoch Viaduct.

But it was the enigmatic wording of the signpost that caught our attention:

PUBLIC FOOTPATH TO

FORT WILLIAM BY CORROUR

(THE ROAD TO THE ISLES)

What a walk that must be!

The following year, Easter was a full two weeks earlier and the seasons over two weeks later. A letter from Major J. D. Rennie of the Moor of Rannoch Hotel, Rannoch Station, Perthshire, replying to our enquiry, said that, yes, we could leave our car at the hotel for a few days provided we left the keys so they could move it if necessary. However, he still seemed surprised when we turned up in the snow. We camped that night beside the nearby lochan. By morning, the pan of water left outside had frozen solid. At least it was too cold and early in the year for the midges.

It would not be beyond endurance to walk the thirty miles from Rannoch to Fort William in a day, but it seemed ideal for a first attempt at backpacking. We loaded our aluminium framed rucksacks, left the car keys with the Major, and set off northwards beside the railway track. And apart from the railway track, there was little else to see for the first ten miles but vast, uninhabited empty moorland. Being Easter Sunday, there weren’t even any passing trains to disturb the isolation. Remote, beautiful, desolate! We saw no one else all day.

The land gradually rises to a summit beyond Corrour, the next station on the line. It was shrouded in mist. The station, since made popular by the film Trainspotting, is now busy with walkers and mountain bikers, and Corrour Station House is a popular restaurant and guest house, but in 1975 there was very little there. We passed without much pause heading for our first overnight camp at Loch Treig. It could not come soon enough. My feet were a mess. Idiotic to attempt such a walk in new boots.

 

The next morning, bright sunshine reflecting from the loch and mountains bathed everything in a brilliant blue light. We set off west, away from the railway, along the southern shore of Loch Treig. The loch is dammed at the northern end, and two lost communities, Kinlochtreig and Creaguaineach, lie submerged beneath the waters close to where we were. As if drawn to them, my blistered feet refused to go far that day and we camped again about a mile and a half beyond the loch, near the Staoineag ruin beside the Abhainn Rath river we were following. There was wood to light a fire and, again, no one around to complain.

 

We covered about eight miles on day three, struggling with our heavy rucksacks across difficult ground. Continuing west, the river becomes angrier and whiter, the wide banks giving way to a steep-sided valley sparsely lined with silver birch. It then becomes still again, with banks of stony mudflats, and the country opens up into wide, browny heath and moorland. But as you approach the once fine house of Luibeilt, now a lonely ruin, you have to ford the river.

We knew the technique. Trouser legs up, socks off, boots back on, wade across with caution, and most importantly, do not lose your footing. The river was not particularly high and should have been trouble free, but it wasn’t. At least I was not the one to slip and fall in, losing the capacity either to give or refuse consent to be photographed ignominiously paddling out.

While drying out, two countryside rangers waded across, the only others we saw on the whole walk. As you would expect, they made it look easy. We chatted with them for the next few miles. They asked whether we had been staying at Luibeilt. It was listed by something called The Mountain Bothies Association as a place of overnight refuge. It sounded good for the future and I joined fairly soon afterwards. 

The rangers sped ahead and disappeared into the distance as we approached the east-west watershed where the water flowing east towards Loch Treig along the Abhainn Rath becomes the water flowing west to Fort William down the Water of Nevis. Several valleys converge here and it was not immediately obvious which one to take, but a bit of map and compass work put us safely in the right direction. No G.P.S. in those days. The slight uncertainty makes for much more fun.

We camped again surrounded by the mountains of the Nevis valley: Aonach Beag, An Garbhanach, and Binnein Beag where deer came down the slopes in the night and made their way back up the next morning, avoiding the worst of the snow that sprinkled the tent.

We were soon up and on our way again, descending through the steep gorge of Glen Nevis to the end of the road at the base of Ben Nevis, where the misspelt signpost indicated whence we came.*

Public footpath

to Carrour 15

and Rannoch 25

But that was not the end. We still had to face another five gruelling miles along the narrow road to the Glen Nevis camp site.

We allowed ourselves the next day off, and early the day after that packed up and hiked into Fort William for the train back to the car. It was a little further to walk than now. The original Fort William station alongside Loch Linnhe, with its turreted entrance on the main street, was still in use. It closed and moved east to the present site two months later.

I did that walk twice again with different friends, once in 1978 and again in 1988, both times by taking the train to Corrour from the new station at Fort William, thus omitting the wearisome Rannoch to Corrour stretch. Sensibly, we also left one of our cars at the end of the Nevis road making it just a fifteen-mile walk – a good day out. On both occasions we were the only ones to leave the train at the deserted Corrour halt, to the incomprehension of the other passengers who looked down (both physically and metaphorically) from the carriage windows with bemusement at our cagoules, walking boots and daysacks. 

I doubt it would be such a solitary walk now that most days the train deposits scores of walkers and mountain bikers at Corrour to follow numerous routes around the moor. The station is used by over twelve thousand passengers per year, an average of over thirty a day, but probably many times more in summer and fewer in winter. “Like a Wallace Arnold bus trip,” my dad would have said. It is a privilege to be able to say I was there in quieter times, nearly fifty years ago, but it would be wonderful to go again.

Take it away, Andy:

https://youtu.be/KtsAfk6h8mI

Notes

* The same sign and post are still at Glen Nevis (or were until relatively recently). The sign is considerably weathered, but the spelling of Corrour has been corrected and further signs to Spean Bridge, Corrour Station and Kinlochleven affixed in both Scots Gaelic and English. 

On one of the later occasions there were signs of construction taking place at Luibeilt, but I see from more recent accounts that it is now a ruin without roof, woodwork or some walls.

I would not be so confident drinking water from mountain streams now. 

Signalling

I recently mentioned four boxes of discoloured colour slides I came across when scanning in. Several people suggested, and indeed showed, it was not difficult to recover at least something like their original appearance. I said I’d try, but needed to get out an old computer with Photoshop Elements which came bundled free with a scanner. These days they expect you to buy it over and over again with a subscription. I refuse to be treated as an income stream.

I got out the old computer but have not made much progress yet. This is not down to any difficulty with Photoshop, but because of distraction. The old computer also contains a set of PC-Rail signalling simulations.    

They might not sound it, but they’re great, they really are – not because of what you do or see but because of what you imagine. You pretend you are controlling all the trains through York, the noise and the power and the enormity of the things, and imagine being on board, remembering journeys once made.  

It could be the summer of 1983, when they invited me to interview for a research job in the world-famous Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. I travelled up from Hull and back in a day, changing at Selby during its last months as a station on the East Coast Main Line before being bypassed by the coalfield diversion They wanted to offer me the job too – they phoned the same evening – but were then overruled by the funding council who insisted on someone either with or close to finishing a Ph.D.

Or it could be any one of the many other times I’ve been through York by train, up to Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow, visiting clients when I was with the software company, or later, to see students on work placement. I once went to Aberdeen on the overnight sleeper, did what I had to do there, returned the next night and was back at work by 9 a.m.

It’s tricky signalling a path through York for the Scarborough Transpennines. They come in from Leeds on the top left of the above screen and need to get to Platform 4 and the Scarborough line on the bottom right. The screen shot shows train 1B23 (Blackpool to Scarborough) nearly there after crossing the East Coast Main Line just outside the station. I have to be careful not to hold up trains from Doncaster and London. I am being distracted by train 2C26 coming in from Harrogate at the other end of the station (below) where it has to get to Platform 8 without  holding up trains from Newcastle and Edinburgh. Fortunately, it’s not very busy – not yet. 

Sheffield is great, too – quite demanding. You control everything from Dore Junction and the Bradway tunnel south of the station (on the left in the screenshot below), to Meadowhall to the north. You have to put goods trains into loop lines to give priority to the London and Cross Country expresses on the Midland Main Line. Oh to be on the Aberdeen to Penzance!

I’ve been through Sheffield a lot too: south to the East Midlands where the software company was based, north to Leeds, York and beyond, and East towards Doncaster and Hull when I lived and worked there. These days you might find me taking the Barnsley branch home. Mother-in-law used to do it when she travelled up from Hertfordshire and changed trains at Sheffield, complaining it was so much easier when we lived near Nottingham, horrified by the Barnsley accents on the local train and dreading her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. They got called posh at school.  

The full simulations are not free, but there are evaluation versions which run for thirty minutes or so without charge, which is all I have ever done. With well over a hundred different stations or eras, there is plenty to do. Some are “heritage” simulations which recreate mechanical lever-framed signal boxes communicating with adjacent boxes through working block instruments and bells. I’ve played with quite a lot of them, both modern and heritage, always there personally in the mind’s eye.

Now, what about those photographs.