The contractors, Gilkes, Wilson and Company, took just forty-three days to reach the central pier, using no modern equipment, methods of communication or even scaffolding. Each of the piers was made of twelve-inch cast-iron columns arranged in two parallel lines of three each and braced to each other by cross girders at five-foot intervals. The fifteen piers were set sixty feet apart, and looked for all they were worth like a prize-winning entry to a Meccano magazine competition. It may have been terrifying to construct – or even to look at – yet there was not a single accident during the entire process of construction.
The awe with which the new structure was regarded is evident from the description of it in a Westmorland directory a few years later.
The Belah Viaduct, over which the N. E. Railway is conveyed, is one of the most imposing triumphs of engineering skill in the British Isles. No adequate idea of the wonderful height of the viaduct can be formed unless a person walks underneath it and then views it at a short distance. Seen in a clear moonlight, when the snow is on the ground or a fleecy cloud of mist partly envelops it, and one of the long trains happens to be passing, the whole appears to be more like the work of enchantment than a very solid reality.
No wonder there were tears in the eyes of the demolition men ordered to tear it down in 1963, just a year after the last train ran – working at the behest of the Tory transport minister Ernest Marples, who sanctioned the line’s closure. These hardened veterans of the scrapyard deemed it a tragedy that such a wonder of Victorian engineering should be destroyed.
But let’s not get depressed. Why not head back to the mid-1950s to take a journey west from Darlington, turning the clock back to the days, within living memory, when the line was enjoying an Indian summer – metaphorical, of course, since the chill Pennine winds mean it’s never quite summer here. The forbidding landscape and poor roads meant that lorries had not yet stolen all the freight, and heavy thirty-wagon trains double-headed by brand new British Railways 4MT tender locomotives ruled the roost. Joining our passenger train at Darlington Bank Top station, the coaches would most likely be superannuated and worn hand-me-downs, displaced from the main line. But even they would have a new 2MT tank engine on the front, fresh out of the works. By 1958 brand-new diesel multiple units had taken over all passenger services, but it was a feature of the railways in the 1950s and 1960s that the arrival of new forms of motive power was nearly always a harbinger of closure.
Looking up at the hands on the magnificent red-brick clock tower of Darlington station, we are bang on time. Reaching the Stainmore line proper at the junction in the little market town of Barnard Castle, we cross the Tees twice – the second time over the massive stone-piered steel-topped Tees Viaduct, 132 feet high and 732 feet long. Ever climbing, with the bark of the engine exhaust bouncing off the surrounding ravine, Lartington West signal box warns that we shall soon be on the mighty curving iron viaduct, 161 feet over Deepdale Beck – a taste of the similar but even more dramatic Belah Viaduct yet to come.
We pause at Bowes, where the local academy inspired Dickens to create his fictional Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, in which that most monstrous of schoolteachers, Wackford Squeers, reigned supreme. Monstrous too is the hard, forbidding trek from here towards Stainmore summit, passing from Durham into Westmorland. No wonder the railway cottages to be seen from the train were called God’s Bridge. Let’s hope the weather forecast is propitious as we climb ever higher, or we may find ourselves embedded in the snow, a frequent event in many winters.
In the arctic conditions of 1947 the Penrith to Darlington train on the morning of 3 February became stuck in the snow on the 1:59 climb to Stainmore summit. Fortunately there was a banking engine at the back, which retrieved the passengers, including a honeymoon couple and a woman with a baby, ferrying them back aboard the last carriage to Kirkby Stephen amid much joshing of the honeymooners. After a week, teams trying to rescue the train were three miles further apart than when they started. A freezing fortnight later, even army flamethrowers could not release the train. ‘It was hissing in the wind,’ as one joker put it. At the beginning of March they tried again, with two Rolls-Royce jet engines mounted on a truck, but still the drifts proved immovable. Explosives helped to break up the ice, but then it froze again immediately. Meanwhile the snow restarted, and the digging had to begin again. It wasn’t until two months after the fateful train had set off from Kirkby Stephen that the locomotive was finally released from its icy prison.
But even amid the bleakness of Stainmore there were joys to be had. One of the signalmen told Peter Walton in his book The Stainmore and Eden Valley Railways,
I spent the happiest days of my life in the isolated Stainmore cabin. As an aspiring young signalman I became acquainted with the beauty of a sunrise on a summer morning, the call of the grouse in the heather … or the simple majesty of a sunset over the valley. I treasure most of all the brilliance of the Northern Lights seen during the night shift when it did seem as if the stars could be picked out of their velvet background. When one of the coloured searchlights of the aurora shot across the sky, things began to happen in the cabin. Bells used to jingle, block indicators danced … and the phone circuit would crackle like a demented Geiger counter.
The freight trains would have needed a banking engine here, but with our three coaches and just a handful of passengers, we are bowling up to the summits and then spinning down the 1:59 descent through the still-treeless landscape to Bleath Gill. Rescue teams were permanently on standby to extract stranded trains, their efforts celebrated in a 1955 British Transport Films documentary, Snowdrift at Bleath Gill – a demonstration of the laborious technique of digging cross-trenches in drifted snow, before charging the drifts with a locomotive at full tilt.
Filmed in an industrial world that had scarcely changed for half a century, this is a portrait of a labour force and a way of life that had almost entirely vanished by the 1960s. Wiry men in greasy overalls fight the elements without regard for the mantras of health and safety or the modern conveniences of phones or computers. Stephenson and Brunel would have recognised the primitive methods used to free the stranded locomotive. When a steam engine becomes snowbound, it is hot and thaws much of the snow around it – which then turns to ice. To clear it, paraffin-soaked rags are set alight around the running gear until the ice melts. Meanwhile the locomotive itself seems to be ablaze. All this drama is accompanied in the film by the soundtrack of the lovely lilting accents of the northern Pennines, as the men get on with their job.
We’re picking up speed through Barras now, with its substantial stone station, once the highest main line station in England until Dent opened on the Settle & Carlisle in 1877. Next is the big dipper of the Belah Viaduct, with the loneliest signal box on the line. Belah box was another bleak outpost, employing three men and open around the clock. The fire was always burning even in summer. Passing trains dropped off lumps of coal together with cans of water to supplement supplies from a nearby well. One of the signalmen was a dab hand at catching rabbits, and peewits’ eggs were regarded as the most delicious of delicacies. Another signalman, George Bishop, who worked the box from 1901 to 1905, was a cricketing enthusiast and had an arrangement with a guard to deliver his evening paper so he could follow the Test match scores. But one day the wind blew the paper out of his hands and down into the valley below, so he climbed hundreds of feet down the viaduct, triumphantly finding it, to learn that the great England batsman R. E. Forster was 287 not out, a world record Test score.
Thank goodness we are now back in the tranquil pastures and gentle woodland of the Eden and Lune Valleys, past Kirkby Stephen. At Penrith or Tebay we may change for Blackpool, Morecambe or the Lake District. There was one passenger train which appeared in no timetable yet ran regularly once a fortnight for thirty years. This was the Durham Miners’ Convalescent Train, which carried injured and sick miners from the coalfields to recuperate in the magnificent Gothic Conishead Priory, near Ulverston, which had been c
onverted into a convalescent home. The sight of the glorious fells along the Stainmore line for the sick men as they headed for recuperation was said to be a restorative in itself.
The first whispers of closure came early, and long before Dr Beeching had darkened the railway scene. Local freight services from stations along the line started to go in 1952, although the line remained busy with through freights and excursions from the industrial towns of the north-east to the Lancashire seaside resorts. In the late 1950s the new diesel multiple-unit trains cheered up the passengers and made easy work of the Stainmore gradients, and hope rose as painters moved in to refurbish the girders of the Belah Viaduct.
But then the bombshell dropped. First the early-morning and late trains were axed. Then, on 2 December 1959, the closure notices went up, reinforcing the adage of the period: ‘If they paint your station, you can be sure it’s going to be closed.’ (The cost of refurbishment was often used as an excuse for shutting targeted railways in the 1960s.) Other dirty tricks were deployed, including holding official meetings for objectors a long distance away, so many of the non-car-owning population were unable to attend. Books were cooked to make the line appear unviable in as many ways as possible, including putting an expensive new roof on the engine shed at Kirkby Stephen, even though the end of steam was just months away.
So convinced was a local quarry owner – one Watson Sayer – that the line had a viable future that he offered to buy it with all its assets. Predictably British Railways turned him down. The last passenger service ran on 20 January 1962, the frequency having dwindled to just three trains each way daily. The remaining freights were diverted via Newcastle and Carlisle. The final obsequies were performed by a steam special, the Stainmore Limited, with 400 passengers on board and double-headed by two British Railways Standard locomotives, Nos 76049 and 77003 – their mixed-traffic livery shone up to the finish of a ripe blackberry. This was a mixed blessing for some who had turned out to mourn, since the last surviving J21, stalwart of the line for half a century and which had been booked to work the train, had to stand down from its one moment of glory.
Two boys from Newcastle Royal Grammar School, dressed in black, laid a wreath. One mourner arrived on a penny-farthing and others on elderly bicycles – symbolising the general view that transport progress had been set back a century. The melancholy notes of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ were played on bagpipes, tears were shed, final photographs were taken, and the Stainmore line ceased to be. As one former railwayman surveying the scene after closure remarked, ‘We were not looking at some remote branch line killed by road transport, but an ex-main line entirely wiped out.’
Today, while the trains haven’t run over the entire route for more than half a century and the weeds now stand higher than ever, there are few greater pleasures in these high places than to stride on foot along the surviving route of the railway. Here is one of the last areas of England where infrastructure has been allowed peacefully to fade back into the landscape, untroubled by developers seeking to make a quick buck. The mightiest of the stone viaducts remain, as well as the remains of various signal boxes and platelayers’ huts. You can still see the stone buttresses for the old Belah Viaduct, protruding like rotten teeth from the hillside. At Barras the former platforms can be detected amid the undergrowth, and the stationmaster’s house is now a private residence.
The site of Stainmore has been lovingly marked by a reproduction of the original sign, itself now preserved in the National Railway Museum. Its curved profile, dwarfing anyone who stands alongside it, is punched out of the metal like a stencil and reads: STAINMORE SUMMIT. HEIGHT 1,370 FEET. Most haunting of all is the skeleton of Belah signal box, now a shelter for sheep but which also performs a kind of religious role for the band of enthusiasts who troop up through the louring clouds to pay homage to the memories of Stainmore. Apart from Mike Thompson’s shrine at Kirkby Stephen, only a couple of miles of track survive – near Appleby in the west and now operated by the private Eden Valley Railway Company – a tiny fragment that lived on after the closure in 1962, first to serve Hartley Quarry at Kirkby Stephen and then a rarely used army camp at Warcop, finally shutting in 1989.
But if you want to summon up the moody atmosphere of the old railway, then you must walk across the three great viaducts at the western end of the line, which have been linked together by a footpath. Unlike my previous wind-lashed excursion to the railway, the sun is shining today, with all the newness of early spring, and it’s not difficult to summon up the drama of a heavy train loaded with pig iron or limestone, slogging its way over the 552-foot-long Smardale Gill Viaduct. Let’s imagine that on the front is one of the supremely handsome 4-4-0 locomotives designed by William Bouch, Thomas’s brother, for the opening of the line – very advanced for its day, with large windows and the first fully enclosed cab on any British engine, necessary as a protection against the weather. Plumes of steam rise into the blue Westmorland sky as the engine pants ever harder over the Scandal Valley (what an inappropriate name! ‘Innocent’ seems a far better word to sum up this unspoilt landscape). The only thing to interrupt the reverie is the appearance of a plaque on one of the abutments proclaiming that the viaduct has been restored with financial help from the (very modern) Virgin Trains.
But no Pendolinos will ever run here. The only sound is the crunch of gravel beneath my feet. At Podgill Viaduct, with its nine thirty-foot-span arches, it is a vertiginous eighty-four-foot drop to the glistening Ladthwaite Beck below. Peering down from the 366-foot Merrygill Viaduct, the view is dizzying as I contemplate precipitously the narrow valley of Hartley Beck. The satanic-looking Hartley Quarry behind the trees, which supplied so much traffic to the railway in its heyday, still functions amid a grey haze of dust, producing aggregate for road building.
Don’t be confused by the BEWARE sign looming up ahead. This is not a warning of approaching trains, but an exhortation to protect the area’s rare red squirrels, part of the wildlife that flourishes as the railway continues its reversion to nature – including brilliant-coloured macaws, which swoop and dive around my head. Theirs is an unlikely Pennine existence, hailing from a conservation centre nearby. Scrambling down between the arches of the Podgill Viaduct to the Ladthwaite Beck, I see nestling against the warmth of the limestone a rare Scotch Argus butterfly, flapping the bold brown ‘eyes’ on its wings as if to advertise that this is its last breeding ground in England. I tiptoe away with an elated feeling that the old Stainmore railway has a new and enduring purpose in life.
There are still dreamers who believe it will be revived, and not just Mike Thompson, toiling away on his restoration projects amid the rain and the rust at Kirkby Stephen East. Further along the old line the Eden Valley Railway Company is hoping to extend its railway track for another few miles. Whether an old British Railways diesel multiple unit in Network South East livery or sundry other British Railways 1960s-era relics operated by volunteers can recreate the glory that once was remains to be seen. But the rest of the route across the high hills to the east seems doomed – thankfully perhaps – to remain a memory of the days when brave people did dirty and cold work without complaint, when you could take a train to remote places for the price of a cheap ticket, when communities pulled together to value their local railway stations as an essential expression of social solidarity. Even so, it is apparent to anyone who has stood in the cutting wind, watching the sheep huddled together from the cold in the remains of Belah signal box, that the ghosts of the old railway are still there, stalking the gills and the moors.
The saddest spectre of all – that of the unfortunate Thomas Bouch – had no inkling of the lasting achievement of his creation across the Pennines. Although it was destroyed physically by a pusillanimous breed of modern politicians, the line will always live on in legend. By October 1881 Bouch was dead ‘of a broken heart’, as the Illustrated London News put it. Even his death did not deter some of the more merciless North British Railway shareholders, who hounded his widow for compensat
ion long after the Tay Bridge disaster. And the prestigious publication The Engineer, which had been supportive during Bouch’s lifetime, turned on him savagely when he died. Referring to the ‘ill-advised and ill-conceived piece of business’ of the Tay Bridge, it commented tartly that it was ‘a little surprising … that he ever got much bridge work entrusted to him again’. Poor Bouch, it must be said, was as much a victim of the Tay Bridge disaster as the passengers and train crew who perished in the icy waters of the river that night.
These days Bouch is most often recalled in the embarrassing doggerel of the poet William McGonagall, who wrote, ‘It must have been an awful sight,/ To witness in the dusky moonlight/ While the Storm Fiend did laugh and angry did bray,/ Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.’
Yet the engineer’s triumphs on the Stainmore line tell an opposite story. In 1859 John Close, a writer from Kirkby Stephen – nicknamed Poet Close by Punch magazine, to which he was a prolific contributor – composed a poem of twenty-nine quatrains entitled Beelah [sic] Viaduct, Wonder of the Age, and dedicated to its engineer, with the first lines running, ‘Oh Bouch! What a prolific brain is thine/ To scheme at first this strange gigantic plan.’
But the final note for posterity is enshrined in yet more verse found in papers buried under the central pier of the Belah viaduct in 1963 as the demolition crews moved in after more than a hundred years of faultless service. They were placed there on 6 September 1859, and – while not exactly material for Poets’ Corner – do a far better job than McGonagall in repositioning the unfortunate Thomas Bouch to his rightful place in the civil engineering hall of fame.
‘The erection of this gigantic and beautiful Iron Structure – the Belah viaduct – was commenced on the 19th day of July in the year of our Lord 1859 … One of its highest piers of 200 feet, we raise as our Ebenezer.’ It goes on:
The Trains Now Departed Page 9