Category: Events

History at Capel’s Viaduct

It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Viaduct,
Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows,
Teazles here and there to raise your nap,
Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago,

Field-names such as Bacon Slad, Calves Close, Sheep Furlong,

Little Chapel Hill, Freeze Land, Side Long Piece, Fir Tree Ground, Wheatlands,

Cobbs Acre, Spout Leaze, Home Ground, Old Well Close, Dye House Mead, Sweetmead;

Each name a toponym with a history and euphony.

The only names we now know and use are ‘Rodborough Fields’.

You pass an old oak sentinel to reach the River Frome

When walking down from Rodborough

(Where the Rev Awdry of railway story fame used to live),
Railway viaduct and river-bridge close at hand,
And there is the dell that once was Capel’s Mill:
Trees clambering down the steep riverbank to shroud the waters,
The remains of a mill sluice quickening the river’s pulse,
Rusting iron work still visible,
The steady drip down from the railway arches,
Sometimes, wild swimming in season,
Sometimes, picnics on high days and holidays,
Sometimes the turquoise flash of a kingfisher,
The splash of an otter or the curve of a dipper;
It’s hard to imagine that spinning jennies once clanked away,
With spinners clocking on and clocking off,
Clerks frowning at the figures in the ledgers,
As the world kept revolving and turning;
But a Spinning Jenny could only stand still at Capel’s Mill,
And watch the steam powered spinning world go by,
As the wooden Capel’s Viaduct was erected by the GWR,

To be succeeded by the brick structure you now see,

Towards the end of the 19^th century.

Some years later, a picture postcard scene

Portrays an elegant Edwardian lady

Clutching the rustic fencing on the river’s bridge,

Just by the old mill site and new-brick viaduct,

Staring at the waters with a detached composure,

As land is sold for the building of the houses where I now live:

“Near the GWR and Midland Railways”,
And the well-known “health resort” of Rodborough Common.

Think of that as you make your way past river and canal,

With Stroud town on your left, Rodborough Common on your right,

And history all around your carriage window,

Waving at you on your way to London.

A Stroud Valleys Railway and Canal Walk

 

At first glance, it might seem a bit odd to link old railway stations and halts near Stroud with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. But if I give some famous lines a Dr Beeching tweak then I think you’ll know what I mean:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair:

No railway halt remains. Round the decay

Of those halts and crossings, and stations too,

The lone and level lines stretch far away.’

But a May time may blossom walk along canal and footpath and pavement, with teazels, marsh marigolds, iris, cow parsley, swans, ducks, a robin and a heron for company, brought the railway past back to life. And even though the construction of a railway represented the acme of Victorian modernity, there is something quite hauntingly liminal about the positioning of these lost sites. The halts and crossings and stations lie where footpaths and holloways used by handloom weavers and packhorse wayfarers cross the valley floor, thence up and down the hillsides. And some of these tracks by the lineside could well be Neolithic: climbing up to ancient sites such as long barrows on the Cotswold scarp. In short, this railway landscape is older than it appears.

 

We started our exploration through time and space with a walk up from Ebley Mill on the Stroudwater Navigation to locate Ebley Crossing Halt (103 miles 52 chains from Paddington) and then followed a footpath to reach the site of Cashes Green Halt (103 miles 23 chains) where we stopped to chat with two residents out for a walk: “Oh, yes. I remember the halt in the old days. I used to use it now and then. You’ve reminded me now. It was just over there. The good old days. Lovely old steam trains.”

 

Walk down the hill back to the canal and turn left, then leave the canal at a bridge and cross the road at a pelican to reach Beard’s Lane and the site of Downfield Crossing Halt (102 miles 72 chains) where a footbridge now stands; then return to the canal to Walbridge, near Stroud Station, then past Capel’s Viaduct (scaffolding and maintenance happening), on to Bowbridge Crossing Halt (101 miles 37 chains) and so to Ham Mill Crossing Halt (100 miles 64 chains). A milepost on the Thames & Severn Canal, near Ham Mill, tells us that we are one and a half miles from Walbridge and twenty-seven and a quarter-miles from Inglesham, where the canal meets the Thames near Lechlade and so on to London.

 

When you reach the Ship just by what was once the second largest inland port in the country at Brimscombe, take a short detour up the hill on the pavement to reach Brimscombe Bridge Halt (99 miles 74 chains) and peer over the sides to look at what was once a busy scene. As it was today, with trackside clearance – did the workers know what was once here, I wondered. Retrace your steps and turn right to reach a red brick canal bridge and turn left to reach a crossing opposite some flats and Ali’s Kitchen (Indian restaurant): this is the site of what was once the furiously busy Brimscombe Station (99 miles 24 chains) with banking engines to assist trains up the steep incline to Sapperton.

 

There’s still a line of old railings along the roadside – once GWR chocolate and cream, I imagine. And two bus stops nearby on the busy A419 in a kind of unconscious memory of the past. As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It is not even past yet.”

 

Gloucester

‘On Monday, the Great Western line was opened throughout from London to Gloucester … 114 miles … four hours and a half distance reckoned by time … by ordinary trains; but there is an express train to and fro each day which performs the distance in five minutes under three hours. On Monday last, this train accomplished the 114 miles in two hours and forty minutes … The newly opened portion of the line passes through a most beautifully picturesque country, opening to travellers some of the choicest scenery in Gloucestershire.

Gloucester Journal 17^th May 1845

 

Two gauges met at Gloucester: Brunel’s GWR broad gauge (only about 10% of the national railway) and the more usual gauge of four feet eight and a half inches, coming down from the north on its way to Bristol. The government had set up a committee to examine the gauge question with the power to make recommendations. Evidence (possibly contrived against the GWR broad gauge) was gathered at Gloucester and the observers from the Parliamentary Gauge Committee, according to this later comment, ‘were appalled by the clamour arising from the well-arranged confusion of shouting out addresses of consignments, the chucking of packages across from truck to truck, the enquiries for missing articles, the loading, unloading and reloading …’

 

Such notorious chaos was famously depicted in The London Illustrated News – and that journal’s illustrations did not always reflect a carefully observed reality. But these are its words: ‘It was found at Gloucester that to tranship the contents of one wagon full of miscellaneous merchandise to another, from one gauge to another, takes about an hour, with all the force of porters … bricks are miss-counted … slates chipped … cheeses cracked … ripe fruit and vegetables crushed … chairs, furniture, oil cakes, cast-iron pots, grates and ovens all more or less broken …’

 

The consequences of this confusion went way beyond freight, of course, with missed connections for passengers. But in the age before standardised time across the nation – ‘Railway Time’ (GMT) – when time was set according to the sun, three different railway companies met at Gloucester and used three different clocks: the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway used Birmingham time; the Bristol & Gloucester used Bristol time, and the GWR used London time …

No surprise that Parliament decided in favour of broad gauge in 1846; our line to Swindon was converted to ordinary gauge in 1872, whilst the GWR converted its overall system piecemeal, often putting in a third rail too, until the complete end of GWR broad gauge in 1892.

Charles Richardson, Sapperton, and Charles Dickens

A GWR Pilgrimage

Brunel diary entry Boxing Day 1835 about the Cheltenham & Great Western Union Railway:

‘… it’s an awkward line and the estimate’s too low …’

 

Charles Richardson became Brunel’s resident engineer on the line between Cheltenham and Swindon and he oversaw the construction of the two tunnels at Sapperton. He was an avid reader then of Charles Dickens’ first novel The Pickwick Papers whilst staying in Oaksey and Chalford. No doubt, later in life, he would have also have avidly read The Signalman by Charles Dickens too. Perhaps his knowledge and experience of tragedy on the line, allied to that later book, led to his conviction that a person on a railway line could become mesmerised by the sight of an approaching train …

Have you ever read that haunting short story The Signalman? A spectre materializes at a tunnel entrance; a telegraph bell rings in the signal box, heard only by the signalman, not by the narrator and observer: disaster subsequently occurs. It’s a lonely, sombre, sunless spot at this tunnel at the signal box. A bit like Sapperton in Richardson’s time perhaps.

 

Working Instructions Sapperton 1894

‘When an up passenger is assisted from Brimscombe to Sapperton the information must be sent from Brimscombe to Frampton Crossing and Sapperton Tunnel signal boxes on the single needle telegraph.’

 

Sapperton Sidings Signal Box controlled lines for goods trains, and the Brimscombe bank engines (needed to assist trains up the steep incline from Chalford). There are two tunnels at Sapperton: the Short Tunnel (352 yards) and the Long Tunnel (1,864 yards). Brunel originally envisaged a single curved tunnel at a lower level than the eventual construction. That would have meant a lower incline and no need for 19^th century banking engines. The bore holes for that ghost tunnel lie hidden deep deep down …

 

I have walked out to the places where Richardson stayed with copies of The Pickwick Papers and The Signalman in my pocket on a railway pilgrimage, together with this letter from by brother-in-law, Rod:

 

‘On my train journeys to Stroud over the years, I’ve always been intrigued by the bridge which crosses the line at a very steep angle soon after Sapperton Tunnel … It was designed by Charles Richardson to enable timber from Westley Wood to be taken down to the Thames & Severn Canal and is quite narrow. Brunel was so impressed with it, he wanted it left without parapets … Richardson lived in Bristol … You might want to visit Clifton where a green plaque at 10 Berkeley Square acknowledges his part in building the Severn Tunnel. He is buried in Almondsbury Churchyard … Richardson – a major figure in the railway through the Stroud Valley and beyond.’

 

Now there’s another pilgrimage to think about: another GWR pilgrimage.

A Tale of Two Water Towers, A Tale of Two Stations, A Tale of Two Rivers

 

It takes less than an hour to walk from Kemble station to the source of the River Thames: it’s usually dry at the spring-source, although I have seen bubbles surface from the depths below when the fields have been in winter-flood. The source is both officially memorialised – and also unofficially with stones left in a circle around the spring.

 

The infant Thames proceeds in a stuttering manner at first, rather than with a spring in its step. Partly, some say, because of the historic pumping of water at Kemble from wells for the steam-powered machinery at the Swindon railway works. The water was originally transported by train from 1872 but the expansion of the factory at Swindon with a consequent and almost insatiable demand resulted in the construction of a mains water pipe all alongside the main line from Kemble in 1903 at the rate of one mile a week for the thirteen miles.

 

You can admire the water tower at Kemble on the down platform, and the Swindon water tower (much admired by Sir John Betjeman) at the far end of the railway village; it was constructed in 1871. The railway works grew prodigiously: from 143 employees in 1843 to nearly 15,000 in the twentieth-century in an area over 300 acres.

 

The source of the Thames also lies close to the site of what was once Tetbury Road station (91 miles and 74 chains from Paddington). A prominent member of the local gentry, Squire Gordon, objected to the construction of a railway station on his estates and so Kemble existed merely as an interchange for Cirencester until 1882 (when Kemble station was constructed after the death of the squire). Tetbury Road closed to passenger traffic in 1882 and became a goods and freight depot. It’s a ghost station now – fittingly, a deserted medieval village lies not far away.

 

But the river makes its inexorable way to London, fed by a multitude of tributaries, including the subterranean and infamously-named Tyburn which makes its way past Paddington and into the Thames at Pimlico. And the GWR makes its inexorable way to Paddington too.

 

Rail and river inexorably interlinked.

 

A Tale of Two Water Towers, A Tale of Two Stations, A Tale of Two Rivers

 

 

Steam Rail Motors and Chalford

 

I first visited Chalford on the train in the summer of 1960. The locomotive was a 1400 class tank engine; 1463 from memory. I thought that a quaint engine at the time but not as quaint as the Art Deco diesel railcars awaiting the scrap yard at the sidings at Rodbourne Cheyney in Swindon. I knew nothing then of the steam rail motors at Chalford. But I did know of stations at Purton, Minety & Ashton Keynes, Oaksey, Chalford and Brimscombe.

 

In 1903, the GWR reported thus on our local line: ‘the Stroud Valley between Chalford and Stonehouse, a distance of seven miles’ with a ‘succession of villages nearly all connected, adjacent to the railway … prosperous looking places … cloth making, silk weaving, the manufacture of buttons, pins, walking and umbrella sticks, and wood turning …The streams furnish qualities peculiar to the requirements of these industries.’ And the springs too, of course: the water at Chalford station came from a spring in nearby Cowcombe Woods.

 

In consequence, later that year, a new service was introduced – the steam rail motor service, twenty-three minutes in time for the seven miles distance between Chalford and Stonehouse. There was capacity for fifty-two passengers and, similar to the underground, there were straps for standing passengers to clench if felt necessary on the journey. Sixteen of the potential fifty-two could sit in cross-seats positioned in the centre of the carriage, with thirty-six seats positioned longitudinally towards each end of the carriage.

One of the joys of this service was the fact that the steam rail motor did not just stop at stations and halts along the way, but also at level crossings in a bid to lure travellers away from the attractions of the expanding competition from bus services in the 1920s. Who needs a bus stop when you can hop off at a level crossing?

But it was a sign of the times: the best of times, the worst of times. The 1920s saw both the hey day and the demise of the service. On the one hand, the service was extended to Gloucester in 1921, but seven years later, the railmotor service met its final buffer.

And the GWR itself had started experimenting with bus services in that decade of change: Painswick or Cheltenham or Cainscross or Chalford or Rodborough or Kingscourt return please.

 

Oh, to have been able to have hopped off at St Mary’s Crossing & Halt, Brimscombe Bridge Halt, Ham Mill Crossing & Halt, Bowbridge Crossing & Halt, Downfield Crossing & Halt, Cashes Green Halt, Ebley Crossing & Halt.

 

 

 

 

The 200^th Anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway

But also, the 200^th Anniversary of the proposed Stroud and Severn Railroad

And the 190^th Anniversary of the Prospectus for the C & GWUR

The Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway

There are national celebrations this year to mark the 200^th anniversary of the first public steam railway in the world: the Stockton & Darlington Railway. But few people know that this year also sees a similar anniversary for a proposed local line: a railroad with horse-drawn wagons, connecting the River Severn with Brimscombe on the Thames & Severn Canal: the Stroud and Severn Railroad.

The line would have run from Framilode Passage, through Frampton, Alkerton, King’s Stanley and so to what was the second-largest inland port in the country at Brimscombe. Branch lines were also envisaged for Nailsworth from Dudbridge via Woodchester, with a line to Iron Mills at Avening too.

Dissatisfaction with the tolls levied by the Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames & Seven Canal and narrowness of some towpaths (so preventing horse-power) prompted this proposal and this proposal prompted criticism from the canals – such an impractical, duplicative and inefficient pipedream! Nevertheless, the canals did reduce tolls and did widen towpaths. And as it happened, Parliament rejected the Bill for the railroad – but dissatisfaction with the canals continued and so many were pleased to see some ten years later …

Prospectus for the C & GWUR

‘The Stockton and Darlington, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railways – the only experiments of the kind in this country which have been subjected to the test of some years of operation – have established beyond all question, the fact, that this mode of conveyance exceeds all others, hitherto adopted, in the great requisites of safety, regularity, speed, and cheapness.’

 

Happy Anniversary to the Stockton & Darlington Railway

Happy Anniversary to the Stroud and Severn Railroad

Happy Anniversary to the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway

Railway Life Part Four

A spring time step in his walk to work,
On past the gas works, the pub and the chip shop,
A wriggle of his hips as he walks past the football pitch,
With egg and bacon for a fry-up on the shovel;

But back in the house, she sits fretting.

Her anxiety worsened, her nerves on edge,
After a twenty-year marriage
Of sleepless fatigue and shifting shifts;
Twenty years of keeping the kids quiet,
And the door knocker muffled:
The Railway Widow;

Sleepless, cold, and alone, in the double bed,
While he tip-toes across the lino,
Gently closes the front door,
And trudges off for the 2.15 link,
Shunting in the sidings,
Feeling the aches in his bones,

Hearing the rustle of the bills in his pocket,

Clutching his pools coupon.

 

 

 

Railway Life Part Three

It’s full steam ahead –

Until, freezing in the cab, paper in his boots,
He gets stuck in a wind-whistling loop,
Out here in some unsheltered, open landscape;

Or, shovelling six tons of coal
Choking in some seeming endless tunnel,
On a two-hundred-mile journey
Of relentless, endless standing,
Shovelling, shovelling, back-breaking labour,
Watching and checking and checking and watching,
Until the journey ends, lodging away.

(He had left home early in the morning,
A stranger to the children;
A weekly pay packet to the wife;
Waiting for the proud longed-for day,
When he takes control of the regulator:
A right proud member of ASLEF);

But now he’s on another interminable shift,
Freight train working in the dead slow of night,
Catching a moment to dream his future:
Mainline passenger link,
And the top pay packet each week –
When name, engine and coal consumption
Will be systematically monitored –
Renting a house close to the lodge,
And close to the marshalling yard,
With double-homers to boost his wage;

 

A spring time step in his walk to work,
On past the gas works, the pub and the chip shop,
A wriggle of his hips as he walks past the football pitch,
With egg and bacon for a fry-up on the shovel;

But back in the house, she sits fretting.

Is this the time he crashes?

 

 

 

 

 

Railway Life Part Two

But down at the running shed: All is different!
Hustle, bustle and red-hot tumult:
Fill the tender! Water the tank! Empty the firebox!
(Cough on the dust, choke on the fumes, burn your hands.)
Smash the clinker! Draw the firebar! Sweep the pit!
(Hot sweat pours down night-cold skin.)
Rake it out! Open the damper! Push it through!
(And rush outside for a lungful of frost-fresh air.)
Clear the smokebox! Four whole wheel-barrows filled!
Race against time! Steam-pressure’s falling! Something’s awry!
Repair the brick arch! Firebar setter! Boiler tube cleaner!
Where’s the fire kindler?

Dreaming he was a fitter
In the quiet order of the fitting shop,
Or a roster-clerk, dozing after tea
But there’s no escape, even in dreamland
From the foreman’s peremptory demands:
Cover the inkwells! Use both sides of blotting paper!
Save on lighting! It’s a full moon!

Or perhaps he was dreaming of the footplate?
That long, long, lifetime ladder
From cleaner to fireman to driver,

Starting out with rag and oil and grease,
And soot and paraffin and tallow fat,
And sulphur and ash and blistered hands,
Unpaid overtime, and a seventy-two-hour week.

But now he sits, chatting and listening,
Drinking tea with the tired eye drivers,
Who now sweep the floors and clean the lavs;
And they sit, tired eye, and declining,
Remembering their footplate days,
Slipping and sliding from mainline shifts,
To shunting and siding;

And as they doze, they recall their footplate youth,
Walking in the driver’s shadow and footsteps
(Behind his black box, overcoat and rule book),
Proud of a brand-new billy can and new blue serge jacket
(No cleaner’s overalls now),
Arriving early to prepare the engine,
The boiler pressure, the water level, the firebox, the fire,

And, of course, the driver’s seat.