The attraction, if not the hangovers, wore off quickly, and the line was in financial trouble within months. Debt collectors turned up at Abbey Foregate station and seized a train. After some haggling, it was allowed to leave but only with a bailiff on board. With suitable deference the man was shown into the train’s sole first-class carriage. After a while, mystified that his coach hadn’t moved, he poked his head out of the window and saw the engine and the remaining carriages vanishing off into the distance. As it was the last train of the day, he had a weary journey home on foot. For the record, he was told that a coupling had broken, but the canny staff of the Potts whispered a different and more subversive tale as they cackled into their pints in the local pubs that night.
The downhill struggle continued, and on 11 December 1866 the company went formally bust and was forced into a fire sale of some of its assets, although three of its five locomotives were allegedly so worthless that they failed to find buyers. Two years later the line ground back into action, although the track had to be reduced to a single line to cut running costs. But, almost unbelievably, the directors scraped together enough cash to open passenger services on two short new branches in the early 1870s. One was to the mining community of Criggion, where the plan was also to pick up some business transporting aggregates from a vast quarry at the foot of the Breiddon Hills famous for its green gravel. The other went west to Nantmawr, where it was hoped to milk some revenues from another quarry producing limestone for the fluxing process in iron furnaces.
Some hopes! In 1880 oblivion loomed again and the line closed abruptly. In the words of the engineer and writer L. T C. Rolt, who visited the line several times over his life, it was ‘like the crew of the Marie Celeste, the staff had been mysteriously spirited away and all was left to rot exactly as it stood. As the years went by the effect was eerie in the extreme’. The wooden bridge over the Severn at Melverley sagged crazily. Kinnerley Junction, the Crewe of the system, was like some ghost town in the American Midwest.
Locals crowded in for bargains when the rolling stock was again auctioned off in 1888. Trucks were a snip, going for as little as a pound each, but the bargain of the day was a handsome 2-4-0 tank called Hope, which went under the hammer for a mere £200. (Hope lived up to its name, lasting for another three quarters of a century, finally going to the scrapyard in 1955 after serving as a shunter for the National Coal Board.) Some repairs were done to the track in 1890, but no trains ran, and the line slumbered on, buried ever deeper beneath the weeds, for seventeen years.
Fast-forward to 1906, when the unlikely figure of Colonel Stephens strode onto the scene, hacking through the undergrowth, in Rolt’s words, to ‘awake Sleeping Beauty’. Grass and thistles were scythed from rusty rails; pigeons were evicted from buildings and a number of new line-side halts opened. A primitive signalling system was installed, and trains were permitted to run again under a provision known as a light railway order. The less demanding standards for track and infrastructure this required meant trains could run even more cheaply, though it was hard to know where costs could be cut any further.
This was a world away from slick modern light rail operations such as London’s Docklands Light Railway. In the agricultural depression of late-Victorian times farmers in remote rural areas needed to get their produce to market. In those horse-and-cart days roads were terrible; there were no vans or lorries and the great days of railway building were long past. So, ever innovative, the Victorians came up with a new concept, made legal by the Light Railways Act of 1896. The idea was to rip up the rule book, cut the frills, avoid the hills, lighten the rails and pack in as many curves and gradients as might be needed. It was a principle that had been applied throughout the empire, so why not at home?
It was with this Act under his arm that Stephens entered the scene, acquiring old railways as an art collector would seek out Old Masters or a wine buff fine vintages. The difference was that instead of increasing in value, the worth of his portfolio was eternally diminishing. But whatever it lost in monetary worth, this empire of tiny railways with quaint names – its possessions extending from the Snailbeach District Railways via the Rye & Camber Tramway to the Weston, Clevedon & Portishead Light Railway – accumulated ever more charm and character as the years rolled by.
What a shame the life of the colonel has not been more celebrated, since here was an extraordinary Englishman. What Colonel Sanders would be for the fast-food industry and Colonel Parker to rock and roll, Colonel Stephens represented in spades for beleaguered railways. He was born in 1868 and remained a single man with few women friends – not surprising in view of the passion for obscure railways that dominated his life – and lived mainly in hotels and gentlemen’s clubs. It was in one such establishment, the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, which he cherished for its clubbability, that he died in 1931.
Tall, with a clipped moustache, bowler hat and cane, he played to the gallery with his military bearing. Some muttered though that he wasn’t quite the real thing, since his rank had reputedly been acquired through service in the Territorial Army, though no one knew for sure. But his devotion to the survival of his railways was such that if traffic receipts at the end of the week weren’t enough to pay the wages, he would stump up the cash himself. He had other curious habits. He would set off from his modest three-storey terraced HQ at 23 Salford Terrace in Tonbridge, pouncing at random on any one of his railways around the country that took his fancy, and order an immediate inspection.
If all was well he would beam, hand out cigars and tip staff with cash out of his own pocket. He even paid for one employee’s false teeth. But the atmosphere would turn thunderous if not, and blistering memos would ensue. Typical is a note written to a manager on one line – the Ffestiniog in Wales – on 10 August 1925: ‘Why are the windows of the 1st class compartment allowed to be open during heavy rain? Letting the windows down for air does not mean letting them down for rain to beat in. You seem to have some perfectly stupid people to deal with …’
But the colonel was in a rather more generous frame of mind on a delightful spring morning on Thursday 13 April 1911, when the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire sprang to life once again with a special inaugural train from Abbey Foregate drawn by an antediluvian 0-6-0 locomotive called Hesperus. Holding the town’s loving cup aloft at the opening ceremony, Major Wingfield, the deputy mayor of Shrewsbury, delivered an oration to the crowd from the roof of a carriage which was reported thus in the Shropshire Chronicle: ‘We are assembled here to open the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Light Railway, which I trust and think will be of great benefit to this borough and the country districts which it serves [Cheers] … I hear the engine blowing off steam, so for fear it should burst, I curtail my remarks and drink out of the loving cup: “Success to the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Light Railway.” [Cheers]’
Amid a fusillade of detonators, the train – including a borrowed Cambrian Railways saloon that was famous (at least locally) for once having carried no less a celebrity than King Edward VII on a trip over the Birmingham Waterworks Railway – set off past a sea of waving flags. Arrival at Llanymynech was celebrated with a feast of sandwiches prepared by the parish council, the train arriving back in Shrewsbury in mid-afternoon. The train ran, according to the Chronicle, ‘with a smoothness which would not compare unfavourably with some of the greater railways in the country’.
Unfortunately the script had to be rewritten two days later, when Hesperus, on its way to Shrewsbury, derailed with three coaches, damaging a long section of track. Although no one was injured, the new railway’s pride was damaged far more than its assets, as a huge crowd turned out to watch the re-railing operation. But no sooner had the line reopened than it happened again just four days later, when the 1.25 p.m. to Shrewsbury tumbled off the rails. The Chronicle reported tartly that the interval between inspection and accident had been ‘amazingly short’. The colonel’s policy of ‘never spend more when you can spend less’ was laid bare for all to see.
; A postcard depicting the railway at the time, sent by a local enthusiast on 17 May 1911, says it all. Captioned ‘Our Local Express’, it shows a train being pulled by a donkey, helped by passengers tugging it along. Someone on the track holds up a sign saying NOT SO FAST, while the signalman appears to be asleep in his signal box and the driver puffs a bellows into the firebox. Still, the colonel did his utmost to bring prosperity to the line. He invented ‘Support your local line’ long before it became a national slogan in the Beeching era. He was also decades ahead of his time in introducing the internal combustion engine in the form of two sets of Ford railcars. They each consisted of two wheezing Model T Ford buses coupled back to back, equipped with a steering wheel at each end with no function (it was there only because the engine controls were mounted on the steering column). At each terminus the driver had to switch off the engine at one end before moving seats and starting the motor at the other. Their hollow steel wheels made such a racket that they scared the animals for miles around in the quiet Shropshire countryside. Smelly, noisy and uncomfortable, they were reckoned some of the worst rail vehicles ever built – and were a terrible advertisement. Staff were frequently forced to apologise in the face of unprintable comments from passengers. As one driver retorted, ‘Well it ain’t a bloody railway any more; just a broken-down bus on rails.’
The infrequent steam services were marginally more comfortable but slower because they also trundled a variety of freight wagons along with the coaches, performing laborious shunting operations on the way. So slow were the trains in fact that it was said that you could keep to the timetable by pushing along a platelayers’ trolley without too much physical exertion. But the colonel was undeterred, pouring energy into his vision by producing a threepenny guidebook for tourists, introducing passengers to the pleasures of the Severn and Vrynwy, and the hills around Llanymynech. The enterprising railway company even set itself up as part of the nascent tourist industry, building camping huts for hikers in the scenic Breiddon Hills and offering rowing boats for hire on the Severn. The huts were a snip at a mere seven shillings a week, and there was the lure of a weekly ticket over the line at a bargain rate.
The guidebook waxed:
This line runs through a delightful country and affords the travelling public every possible facility for pleasure and trading … A journey by rail direct from Shrewsbury to Llanymynech is reminiscent of a past generation. For 30 years the line which links up these two stations had lain derelict, grown over with briar and bramble, and in parts buried in brushwood and copse. But in 1911, the old railway, little the worse for its long sleep, once again rattled to the running of the train, and is now the scene of greater bustle and activity than ever marked its life in the early struggling years of its existence.
The colonel also erected a large sign on the S&M platform at Llanymynech, adjoining the rival Cambrian Railway, which boasted, SHROPSHIRE AND MONTGOMERYSHIRE RLY. SHORTEST ROUTE TO SHREWSBURY. FREQUENT TRAINS. CHEAP FARES. Lucky for him there was no Advertising Standards Authority in those laissez-faire Edwardian times. Although ‘shortest’ might have just qualified in terms of distance, any passenger who spent what might have seemed a lifetime aboard one of the notoriously slow services on the basis of this claim would have been clamouring for their money back. As for ‘frequent trains’, they might be seen as such only in comparison with a service where there were no trains at all.
The colonel’s philosophy was never to buy anything if something cheaper would do – his railways were the eBay, Lidl and Poundland of their day. This was especially true of his locomotive stock. The typical Colonel Stephens operation comprised a wheezing and rackety animated museum of railway history, with ancient second- and third-hand engines representing nearly every locomotive builder in the country and most of the old pre-grouping railway companies too. Neither age nor condition mattered very much – the only requirement was that they had a light axle loading so they did not cause expensive repairs to the fragile track or, worse, fall off. Though to be fair the colonel had an eye for a bargain locomotive in good condition. Typical of the S&M’s ramshackle fleet was the Severn, which originated on the St Helens Railway back in 1853. It spent most of its time rotting and unserviceable, reposing in the nether reaches of the engine shed at Kinnerley.
Not unusual, since most Stephens locomotives were out of service at any one time in various degrees of decrepitude or disintegration, usually amid jumbled heaps of rusting locomotive parts quietly disintegrating in the coal dust. The inability of the maintenance staff to find anything to which these parts could be attached was why so many locomotives were acquired – on the off chance that one or two might be repaired and pressed into service.
Nothing, however, symbolised the bizarre world of Colonel Stephens better than Gazelle, a tiny 2-2-2 five-ton tank engine with wooden wheels – the smallest standard-gauge steam locomotive in the world, which looked for all the world like a pull-along puffer that might have belonged to Christopher Robin in an E. H. Shepard drawing. Not that Gazelle was exactly famous when Stephens bought her after she had been disposed of by the deputy mayor of King’s Lynn, who had used her for private transport in his seed-corn business. She was said to have reached Chesterfield under her own steam once, though judging by appearances the hapless locomotive scarcely appears capable of reaching the buffer stops in a toy train set.
This toy for grown-ups was the quintessential Stephens engine – small, economical, and, more important still, it contained a bench seat for four passengers in the cab. This meant that no coach was required on quieter journeys – a money-saving wheeze brought to an end by a complaint from the Reverend Brock, the vicar of Criggion. Who knows whether this self-important cleric may have received a smut in his eye, but he complained indignantly to the Board of Trade that the arrangement broke safety rules. The railway eventually picked up an old London tramcar on the cheap and cut the top off to create a companion for Gazelle. Everyone observed that it looked a bit like a garden shed on wheels. Nothing went to waste, since the seats from the scrapped top deck were reused on the station platforms.
Who knows whether it was the influence of his artistic family, but the proprietor had a particular weakness for giving his locomotives classical names. The writer L. T. C. Rolt describes a visit to Kinnerley shed in 1929, where rusting bits of old engine were scattered around the trackside: ‘Motive power then consisted of three Terriers: Hecate, Dido and Daphne; three Ilfracombes [ancient 0-6-0 tender engines acquired from the London & South Western Railway], Hesperus, Pyramus and Thisbe; the aptly named Gazelle and the ancient Severn.’
The Terriers were tiny tank locomotives pensioned off from hauling suburban trains around south London (several survive today, including Stepney, long the mascot of the preserved Bluebell Railway in Sussex), and in their middle age were scarcely up to even the undemanding standards of the Potts. Unlike modern engines, they lacked an injector – a device that fills the boiler of a steam locomotive with water under pressure. Rather, the Terriers depended on a primitive axle-driven pump to feed their boilers. Chugging slowly up the gradients, water consumption sometimes exceeded supply, and if the water level disappeared from view in the gauge glass, the crew ‘whistled up’. This was the signal for the guard to jump down from his van and pin down the wagon brakes. The engine then uncoupled and careered briskly up and down the track, pumping water like crazy until the level was restored and the journey could resume.
‘The stock of eight locomotives sounds impressive,’ Rolt observed, ‘but in fact it was seldom that that more than two were capable of service at any one time.’ It was famously said that no locomotive on the Potts was ever scrapped; they simply faded away. This was certainly true of Hesperus, the locomotive so celebrated on opening day, which, minus her boiler, became a rusting landmark in Kinnerley yard, a wreck like her notorious schooner namesake. It was characteristic of the serendipity that defined life in Colonel Stephens’ world that in later years she was plucked from her resting place in th
e weeds, and with a few repairs was put back into service once more.
The carriages derived from equally eccentric sources, boasting examples from the Midland, North Staffordshire, Great Eastern and London & South Western Railways, so that the traveller trundling across the plain of Shropshire might find his or her compartment embellished by faded scenes depicting the Peak District, the Norfolk Broads or the waterfront of Lyme Regis. The plum of the collection was a royal saloon built by Joseph Beattie of the London & South Western and identified from contemporary illustrations as existing in 1844, if not earlier. But the canny colonel’s rolling-stock acquisitions were not so random as might appear. As R. W. Kidner observes in The Colonel Stephens Railways, ‘An ordinary railway, faced with the chronically infirm Melverley Viaduct [it had already collapsed once], would have spent time and money attending to the foundations. Not so the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire. Miraculously there were produced a three-ton locomotive and a horse tramcar, which could be relied on not to strain the timbers, and which, slightly modified, outlived the ordinary passenger trains on the line.’ The acid test for a new engine, some reckoned, was not how efficient or powerful it was, but whether it might cause Melverley Viaduct to collapse.
But then nobody was in much of a hurry, and certainly not the trains. The journey from Shrewsbury to Llanymynech took an hour to cover eighteen miles, and in later years fifteen minutes longer as the trains crept ever more slowly over the deteriorating track. Passengers had to make do with three trains – timed to meet Cambrian’s services at Llanymynech – each way on weekdays, with two extras on Thursdays and Saturdays and two each way on Sundays. The quarries provided stone for some freight trains, although general goods were carried by the passenger services, which usually had a wagon or two in the mix, which would be shunted off periodically as the trains dawdled along the line.
The Trains Now Departed Page 26
