The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  None of this bothered the Met back in the 1890s as it drove relentlessly north on past Aylesbury into ever-remoter countryside, buying up the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway as a short cut. Here was a magical moment for a moribund country railway, if ever there was one. The struggling Aylesbury & Buckingham was conceived out of a hotly fought battle to get the railways into Aylesbury – then, as now, a thriving market town on a branch of the Grand Union Canal, which the railways were keen to put out of business. The mighty London & North Western Railway was first in, with a branch from the Euston to Birmingham main line at Cheddington in 1839. Its twenty-three-year monopoly was smashed by the Great Western Railway, arriving from High Wycombe in 1863. But there was still a tantalising opportunity for a new north–south line through the rich Vale of Aylesbury.

  The big idea first came along in 1860, with a proposal to link up southwards to the London & North Western Railway at Tring, connecting into its great London terminus at Euston. From the north, the trains would connect into the Buckinghamshire Railway, running cross-country from Bletchley to Banbury via Buckingham. Predictably, the mighty L&NWR vetoed the idea. But this didn’t stop local landowners from pressing ahead with the northern section. It was effectively a game of musical chairs, and who could possibly stand in the way of the Marquis of Chandos, who became the third and final Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1861, and Sir Harry Verney, MP for Buckingham?

  The Duke of Buckingham had an especially colourful heritage. Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (1823–89), only son of the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, was in serious financial difficulties by the middle of the nineteenth century. His father had spent heavily on artworks, womanising and attempting to influence elections, and by 1847 had been nicknamed the greatest debtor in the world. Most of the family’s 55,000-acre estates and their London home at Buckingham House were disposed of to meet debts, and the family seat at Stowe was seized by bailiffs as security and its contents sold. The only property remaining in the control of the Grenville family was the family’s relatively small ancestral home of Wotton House and its associated lands around Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire, and the Grenvilles were looking for ways to maximise profits from the remaining farmland and seeking business opportunities in the emerging fields of heavy industry and engineering.

  So with noble, and maybe some ignoble, backing a new line opened in 1868 from Aylesbury to Verney Junction, through the sleepiest of stations at Quainton Road, Grandborough Road and Winslow Road (‘Road’ being railway promoters’ shorthand for a station that was usually a daunting hike from the local village or town). The duke was appointed chairman and Sir Harry vice-chairman of the new concern.

  For years nobody much came or went on the little trains. The single track was so flimsily constructed that only the most delicate of locomotives – two light 0-4-2 saddle tanks – were used to operate it. Even these had to be borrowed from the Great Western Railway because the line had spent all its money on construction and had none left over. They tugged behind them some antiquated coaches discarded from a railway in the West Midlands. But all that changed when the mighty Met swept up the line in 1892. The track was relaid and doubled, and when through services to London began, the trains got heavier and the locomotives more powerful, as befitted a proper main line. What a sight some of them were, right up to the end – perhaps one of the Metropolitan’s big H Class 4-4-4s on the up Pullman, or the state-of-the-art K Class, built in 1925, on a heavy freight rumbling down from Neasden – and all exotic quarry for trainspotters, who loved the idea of steam on the Undergound.

  But the Met’s intrepid advance didn’t last long. The brand new trunk line of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway was powering towards London along a parallel trajectory to the west, joining the Aylesbury & Buckingham at Quainton Road, and cutting the blood supply from Verney Junction as a potential route to the north.

  Poor Verney, stranded in the middle of nowhere and left to wither – not a town, nor a village, nor even a hamlet, but somewhere in the middle of a field. There was no local population to serve a station, no shop, church or chapel, and even the most ruthless of Metro-land estate agents never thought the hinterland promising enough to build any homes. But it did at least lie on the route of the existing ‘Varsity Line’ – which meandered across the country from Oxford to Cambridge – at its junction with the line to Buckingham. This was where a dream died. A couple of platforms were built where the two lines met, linked to the outside world by a dirt track. The best that could be hoped for was that the platforms might be filled by passengers changing trains. At least the station had a noble name, christened after the local landowner Harry Verney, who was Florence Nightingale’s brother-in-law. Curiously, Verney had another station named after him – at Calvert on the Great Central Railway nearby. He had changed his name from Calvert to Verney after inheriting his cousin’s baronetcy.

  For decades the trains stopped but few people ever got on or got off, although Verney Junction was always a cheery place. One of the engine drivers, Sam Grigg, described it in his memoir Country Railwaymen:

  Somehow the station always seemed to have staff that made it a place to remember. A traveller who had to change at Verney Junction could have an experience that would remain in his memory. A well-kept station can be an asset to the countryside; Verney was an asset to the rural and beautiful Buckinghamshire landscape. There were many summers in which a waiting traveller would pace the platforms and admire mermaids guarding the pool of goldfish. There was the windmill, the seal, stork and elves, all standing passively by, hardly likely to do other than delight any passer-by. A gardener would rejoice in the well-trimmed bushes, flowers and lovely standard roses. In the winter time there were compensations at Verney; a small, cosy waiting room with a bright fire, shining windows and polished floor, and that window gave a fine view of a wide expanse of countryside.

  But the shadows were starting to lengthen. In 1933 the Metropolitan Railway was absorbed into London Transport, which concluded that its main job was to run Tube trains beneath the busy streets of the metropolis rather than pour money into an isolated country railway for the sake of a handful of passengers and a few milk churns. So on 4 July 1936 passenger services from Quainton Road to Verney Junction were withdrawn, leaving the steadily rusting tracks open just for the occasional goods train. No longer would the porter cry, ‘Hurry along for the London train’ – even though sometimes there was not a soul there at all to hurry! No more would the stewards aboard the Pullman cars in their crisp starched jackets lay out the white tablecloths and light the stove to grill the kippers and kidneys that were the breakfast favourites of stockbrokers on their way up to London, the passengers all naturally acknowledged by name every morning.

  The line to Verney was not the only antique curio hereabouts that London Transport inherited from the Metropolitan. A few stops up from Verney at Quainton Road it was still possible until 1936 to change onto the Brill branch – even more superannuated and lost in obscurity than the ‘main line’ to Verney. At the branch line platform, at the head of a creaking carriage and forgotten by almost everyone at HQ, could be found one of the ancient tank engines that had been pensioned off from service under the streets of London when the inner section of the Metropolitan Railway was electrified.

  In its brief sixty-four-year life the Brill branch had progressed from being a primitive horse tramway, known to locals as the Wotton Tramway, or simply the Tram, to an artery of the London Underground. Extending for just seven miles, the line was originally the private fiefdom of the Duke of Buckingham, whose estate it was designed to serve and over whose land it ran for almost its entire length. Brill, the tiny hamlet that formed the destination, was famed for its ancient windmill – frequently cited in Metropolitan Railway literature – but not much else. The few houses could certainly have done nothing much for passenger revenues. At first horses were used to pull the wagons over tracks formed of sleepers laid l
ongitudinally to save money but which hardly made for a comfortable journey. Maybe this did not matter, since the only passengers were workmen on the estate, but soon villagers were clamouring for a ride, and the railway purchased a coach from the Great Western Railway, which passengers had to share with milk churns, chickens, barrels of beer, pigeons and any other goods that turned up for the train.

  Even more eccentric was the first locomotive, acquired from Aveling & Porter of Rochester in Kent, a company famed for its traction engines and road rollers – from which, to the casual eye, this snorting chain-driven behemoth looked indistinguishable. When the railway opened to the public in 1872 the number of passengers carried was tiny – only six or eight a day. This may not have been unconnected with the stench from the vast amounts of manure that were transported – 3,200 tons in 1872 alone. Worse, contemporary reports referred to vast piles of the stuff in fields all along the line side.

  One of the curiosities of the era is a printed book, The Rules and Regulations for the Conduct of the Traffic and for the Guidance of Officers and Men engaged on the Wotton Tramway, written by the line’s general manager R. A. Jones and published under the aegis of ‘His Grace, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Proprietor’. It included a table of fines for errant staff. The driver could be fined a shilling (then a substantial sum) for not having his engine ready, and he would have to forfeit half a day’s pay if he were late at Quainton Road. Guards faced similar penalties, with the loss of half a day’s pay if the train were more than ten minutes late setting off. All this may have seemed unnecessary on a railway with no signals and which only had one steam engine, but the duke, who in his day had been chairman of the mighty London & North Western Railway, was having no truck with anything less than the highest main-line standards on his own little line.

  According to a timetable from the 1880s, the average speed between Brill and Quainton was 4 mph, due to the necessity of stopping at five intermediate stations and many farm gates, which the fireman had to jump down from the engine to open and close. Even so, derailments were frequent, and on 8 March 1883 there was an appalling tragedy. The lady’s maid of the Duke of Buckingham’s daughter was walking along the line with two other lady’s maids near Wotton, having disembarked from the evening train to Quainton. The engine driver pooped the whistle, but Maria Nichols lingered a moment too long and was fatally injured by the locomotive.

  For most of the time nothing much happened to disturb life in the verdant backwoods along the Brill branch. But it had a couple of brief flirtations with greatness. In 1874 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bought the site of what was to become one of the great stately homes of England at Waddesdon Manor. Many of the construction materials arrived over a spur at Westcott station from the Brill branch. Such was the lavishness and authenticity of this attempt to recreate a great chateau that teams of Percheron mares from Normandy were employed to haul the loads from the railway up to the summit at Lodge Hill, where the manor was built. The future King Edward VII came here by Metropolitan Railway, using the special station built for the house at Waddesdon Manor on the Verney Junction line. The locals marvelled as he passed by in a special saloon coach built for the Rothschilds, drawn by a tank locomotive decorated on each side with Prince of Wales feathers.

  Less successful was a plan in the 1880s to turn the Brill branch into a main line running from Aylesbury and Oxford. The track was relaid and some new locomotives acquired, but the dream expired with the death of the Duke of Buckingham in 1889. The Brill line slumbered on into the twentieth century, its tranquillity undisturbed, sustained by a little freight from a tileand brickworks near Brill and the conveyance of picnickers to a beauty spot at the aptly named Wood Siding. Sitting in the dappled sunshine of a glade under the trees alongside the little wooden platform there it was possible to imagine momentarily that London was on the other side of the universe.

  The last train on the Brill branch wound its leisurely way through the countryside on 30 November 1935, and the following poignant note appeared in The Times on 2 December.

  On Saturday night for the last time an antiquated little tank engine drew an equally antiquated passenger coach along the seven-mile line between Quainton Road and Brill. The train contained officials of the Metropolitan Railway Company, including an assistant superintendent. It stopped at each of the five stations on the line. Documents, records and all valuables from each station were placed in the guard’s van and the station lights were put out and the train steamed to its destination at Quainton Road.

  The little Brill branch had simply run out of puff.

  In the spring of 1936 auctioneers moved along the railway, station by station, selling everything off at knockdown prices. At Brill the booking office and waiting room with lean-to lavatory were a snip at six pounds. At Wood Siding the lovely old station sign was knocked down for just three shillings. What a bargain for some fortunate farmer the water tower at Wotton must have been. Going, going – it went for just ten shillings. Luckily, no fewer than two locomotives have survived to this day – a triumph of preservation given how tiny and obscure the railway was. Who would have imagined that Aveling & Porter No. 807 would have lived on from those early days in 1872? And when Metropolitan Railway A Class 4-4-0 tank locomotive No. 23 retired from life underground after the Met was electrified in 1905–6, how lucky it was pensioned off to the Brill branch, where it ducked the blowtorch and is now a celebrity resident of the London Transport Museum in London’s Covent Garden.

  As for the rest of the branch, there is scarcely a trace of it today, although the station at Quainton Road is lovingly preserved as the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre and a shrine to all things Metropolitan. Even with the help of OS Map 94 from 1919, unearthed by foraging through the shelves of the Aylesbury Oxfam shop, I could find little sign of the course of the old Brill railway trackbed. The large oak tree that shaded the simple platform at Wood Siding is still spreading its boughs, and memories live on in place names, such as Tramway Farm, Tram Hill, but almost everything else has disappeared.

  After the Brill line was obliterated, the Verney line dragged on for a little longer. Scheduled passenger services had gone, and the infrastructure quietly continued to moulder. During 1939 the cranes moved in to reduce most of the line to single track, and the signalling was removed, turning what was once intended to be a great main line into a long siding. The Second World War brought a reprieve, and the line up to London was busy with shunters bustling around on coal trains to Baker Street. There was even the odd passenger service in 1943 and 1944 for wartime workers, though these were a well-kept secret.

  But the end was inevitable, as it was for many country railways that sleepwalked through the war. A wartime connecting line had been built at Shepherd’s Furze Farm near Claydon, linking the Great Central line to the north with the Oxford–Cambridge route, creating an alternative route for freight trains to the capital. For years the surviving double-track section from Winslow Road to Verney Junction was a Valhalla for old rolling stock, which rusted peacefully, hoping to dodge the inevitable, until somebody finally remembered its existence and sent it to the scrapyard. The last of this section of track was lifted in 1957.

  The remaining passenger services were dwindling away too. On 7 September 1964 the Verney Junction to Buckingham service closed, despite a brave experiment with some ultra-modern diesels – the Buckingham to Banbury section had already gone in 1961. How incredible it must seem to today’s commuters in the Vale of Aylesbury that the university town and former administrative centre of Buckinghamshire – now rail-less – was once served by some of Britain’s most modern post-war trains.

  Poor Verney was a junction no more, and soon there would be no trains either. Passenger services on the Verney section of the old Varsity Line ceased as the New Year dawned on 1 January 1968. Occasional freight trains would rumble by, shoving the weeds aside, but this was always a special location in the middle of nowhere – a ‘place of refinement’ as one historian put it. T
here was never a moment more evocative than nightfall, when the platforms were lit by the soft yellow glow of the oil lamps, their wicks neatly trimmed daily by the porter. The down outer home signal at the Metropolitan Railway junction would drop for the arrival of the London train as regularly as the signal box cat would tiptoe across the long lattice bridge for its supper.

  And what memories of the grand journeys that could once be taken from here. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine the train home to Verney on the evening commuter run from Baker Street, perhaps aboard Pullman car Galatea or Mayflower, richly endowed with comfortable armchairs set out in small saloons rather like a gentleman’s club. Or even one of the theatre trains, late on a Saturday evening. ‘The scheme of decoration of the cars is that of the latter part of the eighteenth century,’ enthused the Railway Magazine of the day,

  with remarkable artistic effect. The mural scheme is composed of panels of fine fiddle-back mahogany or wainscot oak, inlaid with enrichments of the period it represents on a ground of fine quartered veneer. On the eight glass-topped tables with which each car is supplied there is a tiny portable electrolier of a very chaste design. In addition to those lights, there are, at intervals, wall brackets affixed to the panelling. Quite handy to the passenger are the bell pushes and the lamp switches. These and the number frames are all of ormolu, finely chased and gilded.

  The luxury didn’t stop there. ‘Even the blinds, which are of green and silk damask, have been specially woven, and above each blind is an ormolu baggage rack with finely chased ornamentation and panels of brass treillage. The floor covering is of a luxurious pile carpeting, a harmonious colour blend with the beautifully upholstered armchairs that are covered in morocco.’