Nor did anyone exert themselves very much if they could avoid it. With its two through platforms and branch bay, Kinnerley Junction, where trains diverged for the Criggion branch, was by far the most imposing station on the system, boasting quite an impressive array of signals controlled from a frame of thirteen levers protected from the weather by a corrugated-iron shelter. Here presided as stationmaster the appropriately named Mr Funnel, plump, genial and rubicund, a character straight out of the world of Will Hay’s Oh, Mr Porter!.
Rolt was a friend of his and recalls, ‘He was also captain of the village cricket team, employing a runner when he went to the wicket because of his high blood pressure. Fortunately the proceedings at Kinnerley Station were not calculated to endanger his health by any call for violent exertion.’ Only the up platform was used for passenger trains, the down platform and bay being usually filled with either goods wagons or coaching stock in various stages of decay. ‘When Mr Funnel heard a down train from Shrewsbury approaching (the Ford railcars announced their coming as soon as they left the next station at Edgerley) he would indicate in a desultory motion of a flag that it was expected on the up side. This obviated an unnecessary effort in pulling off signals and crossing from one platform to another.’
There was a similarly relaxed mood in the locomotive shed. Bill Willans, who joined the line as an apprentice in 1928, describes his first day at work: ‘I made my way to Kinnerley shed! Not a soul in sight! There were no lights of any sort and a general air of abandonment.’ One of his jobs was to ride to the rescue after the frequent accidents along the line. ‘I particularly enjoyed this work when the “Rattlers” [the Ford railcars] broke down away from Kinnerley. A platelayer’s trolley was acquired and Sid and myself pumped our way to the scene of the disaster. This seemed often to take place when they were doing a run to Criggion, and failure usually took place in the vicinity of the Tontine Hotel! Among other things he taught me was that classic “It Was Christmas Day in the Workhouse”.’
With his ragbag collection of prehistoric locomotives and carriages, Colonel Stephens fought hard but eventually lost his battle against the motor bus. His appeal to prospective passengers to ‘travel across country away from the dusty and crowded roads on home-made steel instead of imported rubber’ fell on deaf ears. By the end of the 1920s the weeds were taking over the stations, the footboards on the bridges were rotting and the camping huts falling into disrepair. When this lovable oddball of the railways died, there was no will to keep services going, and in 1933 regular passenger services were suspended. The daily goods and excursion train ran till the outbreak of war, by which time the tracks had more or less retreated beneath the undergrowth.
But it wasn’t in the DNA of the Potts to abandon hope, and soon another opportunity was on the horizon. World War II may not have been a blessing for many, but it was a godsend for the fortunes of the S&M. Britain became a huge military base, and rural Shropshire was chosen as the location for vast ammunition depots, among them a huge secret storage site at Kinnerley. Some twenty-three square miles of land was requisitioned around the railway, and more than 200 gargantuan storage sheds, camouflaged with turfed roofs, were built around the station, each served by a siding.
You might think that a dose of army discipline would have sharpened the line’s operation, but that is to underestimate the Potts’ enduring eccentricity. The driver of the first train to enter Abbey Foregate under the new regime misjudged the gradient into the station. Smashing through the buffer stops, the engine burst through a large advertisement hoarding, ending up on the main road. The line may have lost its owner but none of its eccentric character. However, in other ways the little old railway was transformed by the military beyond the wildest expectations of the colonel. Before long as many as twelve locomotives including little Gazelle were in steam at any one time. At the end of the war modern 1940s-built Austerity engines were brought in to do what the old ones couldn’t. The stations, bereft of passengers for years, crawled with servicemen who spared no effort in renewing and maintaining the line, including relaying the rotting wooden track with concrete sleepers. The new motto of the railway was, in the words of the 1930s American children’s book The Little Engine that Could, ‘I think I can.’ As if to prove it, an astonishing million tons of military traffic was carried between 1941 and 1945.
After the war the line became part of the nationalised network, although remaining under military control. Figures made public at this time showed that after absorbing nearly £2 million of capital expenditure in the eighty-two years of its life, the Potts had a cash value of less than £30,000. Charm was always its most bankable asset though, and staff were very welcoming to nostalgic souls who turned up to ride on the one train a day that was run for civilians. Towards the end a group that asked for permission to walk along the line was delighted to find a railcar had been laid on to give them an impromptu tour of the track.
In 1959 the War Department closed the last depot and stone traffic from the quarry at Criggion ceased. The following year the line was returned to civilian status, to be operated by British Railways. But if the Potts was at death’s door in 1933, what hope did it have decades later, with Dr Beeching around the corner? The last scheduled train from Shrewsbury to Llanymynech ran on 26 February 1960, and three days later the line officially closed.
Not much survives of the Potts today. But shades of the colonel – ramrod straight as always – still stalk this country railway which was so eccentrically his own. By a supreme irony, the once wobbly Melverley Viaduct lives on, now rebuilt and providing a vital road link. Part of the Shrewsbury ring road is named Old Potts Way, commemorating where the track once ran and now reverberating to the thunder of the juggernauts that eventually took over the stone traffic.
A much more important souvenir also lives on, not in the Welsh borders but far away near Stephens HQ in the Garden of England, where Gazelle reposes in a charming little museum at Rolvenden on the preserved Kent & East Sussex Railway, another outpost of the colonel’s empire. The army took such a fancy to her that they preserved her as a novelty, and she now forms part of Britain’s national railway collection. Safe from the liquidator and scrap man now, although her custodians tell me she will never run again.
But just imagine how lovely she would look at the head of her little train with the evening sun setting off her shiny green paintwork against the mellow red sandstone of Shrewsbury Abbey. The clock chimes, the signal drops with a clatter, and we set off on our train of dreams. Well, stranger things have happened in the curious history of the line that refused to die.
Chapter Fifteen
We do like to be beside the seaside
Pack your bags and load up those crates of ale for a railway excursion to the seaside. Today we’re heading for Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Tomorrow we could be making merry on a day trip to Scarborough, Morecambe, Bridlington or Bournemouth. Hurry, though. The tickets will soon be gone.
SLIP OFF THE seafront at the side of the tower. Nip along the alley past Poundstretcher, Poundworld and the 99p Store. (Don’t forget we’re in twenty-first-century Blackpool now.) Dodge the wide boys handing out flyers for stag and hen dos in dodgy nightclubs. Don’t get seduced by the dazzling banks of digital lights on the gaming machines in Coral Island. Hold your nose past the stench of frying onions on the hot-dog stalls. Surely there must be some trace of what I’m looking for? Not so long ago everyone knew their way to Blackpool Central, the largest and busiest seaside station in the land, if not the planet.
But I’m struggling to find it today. Instead, where rails once reigned supreme is one of the biggest car parks in northern England. These days clues to the recent past are rare indeed. If you are especially sharp-eyed you might spot, all along the side streets, the rows of boarding houses, now mostly down at heel, where swarms of landladies once emerged to lure the tourists off their trains into rooms where the odour of boiled cabbage was ever-present and there was hot water only if you were lucky. (Let’s ho
pe life has moved on at the Central Hotel – still advertising its wares opposite the spot where the main station entrance once stood.) These Blackpool harridans, the world’s first tourist touts, were so pushy that their activities led to a ban in 1869.
Industrial archaeologists might also pick out the gents’ toilets – a vast bank of them – once urgently needed on arrival to relieve the pressure from all those crates of Tetley and Thwaites bitter consumed aboard trains without corridors. Now they are the coin-in-the-slot kind where stingy local councils force you to jiggle for change to open the door. Come off it – 20p for a pee? No self-respecting bladder would have put up with it in the old days.
But that’s it. The rest – all fourteen platforms and a glorious chapter of social history – is buried beneath our feet. Here lie the fragments of a grand terminus that once funnelled tens of millions of holidaymakers directly onto the most celebrated stretch of promenade in Britain, just a 99 Flake’s throw from the sea. For 101 years the twenty-three acres of Blackpool Central station annually transformed a backward coastal hamlet into Europe’s top tourism resort. The newly leisured masses of northern England poured through the ticket barriers straight onto the Golden Mile to a myriad of sensuous delights – the tang of sea spray on the air, the sugary whiff of candyfloss and the throat-catching aroma of salt and vinegar from a hundred fish ’n’ chip shops. Crowning the concourse was that Lancastrian evocation of Paris, the Blackpool Tower. For a week or two the grim workaday reality of Lancashire and Yorkshire mill-town life would be swapped for the hedonistic delights of the seaside.
This was the kiss-me-quickest, fish-’n’-chippiest, sauciest, how’s-your-fatherest station in Britain, if not the world. It was the Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Lime Street and Manchester Piccadilly of hedonism rolled into one, as well as the apotheosis of the railway holiday by the sea. But then a tsunami rolled over the railways in the closure years of the 1960s, drowning not just Blackpool but the rest of the Fylde coast as well and delivering a fatal blow everywhere to the essence of the British seaside holiday as we once knew it.
As the lights were dimmed on a dank, foggy evening on 1 November 1964 at the finish of another season of the famous illuminations, the very last train pulled out of Blackpool Central station, tearing the heart out of the town. Station staff and local people alike wept as the 9.55 p.m. for London Euston slid out of Platform 3. Even on that last day there had been fifty-five departures, so the station was hardly moribund. After the final arrival – a local from Manchester Victoria – whose driver sounded his hooter mournfully before being given a kiss by his wife and a bottle of beer by his son, the stationmaster turned the keys in the tall iron gates for the very last time. The following day, the Blackpool Gazette reported, the once thronged station resembled a ‘ghost town’. How could it have happened? The railways were Blackpool. And Blackpool was the railways. And both were an essential element of the alchemy that made the British seaside holiday a unique experience in the world.
Originally the railway companies weren’t too bothered with this dot on the Fylde coast, whose sands were regarded as a place more suitable for fishermen digging for lugworms than holidaymakers having the time of their lives. The target was Fleetwood, further north, where before the days of a fully fledged railway to Scotland the dream was for passengers to transfer to steamships for onward travel to Glasgow. But once the new Preston & Wyre Railway had laid its tracks to Fleetwood in 1840, it opened a branch to Blackpool in 1846 over land purchased from the Clifton/Talbot family, building a terminus called Talbot Road, now named Blackpool North. Meanwhile, the tracks of the new Blackpool & Lytham Railway were racing up the coast from the south, arriving at Hounds Hill, as Central was first called, on 6 April 1863. From then on, the hospitality industry that still defines Blackpool as a destination scarcely paused to take breath until the traumatic events of almost a century later unfolded.
The closure of the town’s main station was a shock from which many say the resort has never recovered. True, Blackpool still has a railway, although much reduced – at Blackpool North on the fringe of town, as well as the stump of the old Central route at Blackpool South station, the line hacked back from the town centre to a single platform at the end of a siding with a meagre hourly service to the rest of Lancashire. But where I am standing now, where the weary hordes of the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns emerged to get their first glimpse of the sea, there is not a jot to show of what was once here. Today there are only sporadic long-distance services and no late departures.
What bathos! How terrible a comedown from its 1930s heyday, when six million people a year travelled to Blackpool and its adjacent resorts by rail – not to mention the myriad rail journeys made by local people around this huge coastal conurbation. In the week running up to August Bank Holiday in 1935 more than half a million passengers passed through the barriers. During the illuminations period at the end of the season there were some three quarters of a million visitors.
For those in charge of Central station this represented a superhuman feat of logistics. The main signal box at Kirkham North Junction on the approaches dealt with 600 trains in a 24-hour period, averaging one every 180 seconds. In the tangle of lines around the station there were 22 miles of track where 40 trains could be stabled and prepared for the return journey. In Blackpool’s not-so-distant heyday you could party through the night in the Tower Ballroom and still get a train home. In 1952 the final departure was at 1.55 a.m., while passengers were already milling about at 4 a.m. to catch the early-morning trains. The late trains would often arrive at their destinations with scores of light bulbs missing – removed by courting couples before engaging in what the staff termed ‘a bit of hanky-panky’. Even up to the end the scenes of passengers arriving and departing were like something from a Frith painting. There is a famous 1963 photograph of trippers off a train from Oldham – men with Brylcreemed quiffs, women in dresses from the set of A Kind of Loving – joyously surging along the platform to the sea. So huge is this smiling crowd that they are almost spilling over the platform edges.
But when the final whistle blew from that last train just a year later it signalled not just the effective end of the railways in Blackpool but an entire chapter of British social history. A family holiday at the seaside was one of the greatest inventions of the Industrial Revolution. In the years before motorways and easyJet, trains were the obvious way to get to the seaside. They were mostly comfortable, and the journey was relatively stress-free – certainly compared with security-dominated airports today. In many people’s minds, right up to the beginning of the 1960s, the annual journey to the seaside aboard a train was associated with pleasure, relaxation, the joy of sharing simple delights with your children in an era before iPads, smartphones, Snapchat and Twitter. The mood was encapsulated by the historian C. Hamilton Ellis, who writes in his 1947 book The Trains We Loved, ‘Surely it was always summer when we made our first railway journeys … Sun shone on the first blue engine to be seen, a Somerset & Dorset near Poole; there was sunshine, most dazzling, on a Great Western brass dome; the sun shone on an extraordinary mustard-coloured engine of the London, Brighton and South Coast, seen by three-year-old eyes.’
Until they were transformed by the railways, seaside resorts had tended to be haunts of the sick seeking healthier climes, a fashion going back to Roman times, when the waters of Bath and Buxton were associated with a host of cures, both physical and spiritual. Later, in the eighteenth century, they acquired a social function, with the Prince Regent savouring the waters at Brighton and the Yorkshire gentry dipping their toes in the sea at Scarborough. Blackpool was no exception, marketing itself at the end of the century as a place to take the waters, and in 1781 a direct stagecoach service was established from Manchester and Halifax.
Within a few years the resorts had started to multiply rapidly. Jane Austen catches the spirit in her last, unfinished novel Sanditon. ‘“Every five years,” says Mr Heywood, “one hears of some new place or
other starting up by the sea, and growing the fashion. How can half of them be filled?”’ The answer was supplied by the burgeoning railway companies. As Jeffrey Richards and John Mackenzie put it in The Railway Station: A Social History, ‘To bring the new holidaymakers to the sea a transport revolution was required. Steam was the great liberator.’
By the end of the eighteenth century the coastal resorts were undergoing the first stages of the process that was to transform the seaside holiday from an exclusive upper-class recreation into a national institution. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to a large and well-to-do middle class, which wasn’t slow to emulate the aristocracy in travelling to the seaside to enjoy the air and waters. The final three decades of the nineteenth century were to see a similar move by the working class, keen to experience the benefits of fresh air and seawater, the chance of amusement and relaxation away from their work, or just a change of scene from the grim tenements and back-to-back houses in which they lived and the satanic mills and factories in which they toiled.
Enter another British invention that became a key ingredient in the mix – the seaside excursion train. The first railway in Britain to carry fare-paying passengers on a seaside excursion used horses and ran along the coast of South Wales near Swansea, between Oystermouth and Mumbles, in 1807. The line operated until 1960 and was unique in that it used five forms of power in its 143-year history: horse, steam, electricity, diesel oil – and even an experiment with wind propulsion using sails.
The Trains Now Departed Page 27