Havenstreet station building - Railway Modeller

[bécasse]

Approximately thirty years ago the Railway Modeller published an excellent front and side elevation drawing, in colour, of Havenstreet station building in the Isle of Wight as built by the Southern Railway in 1926. Neither a quick search through my own large stack of back numbers nor a trawl of the internet were successful in finding details of which issue the drawing appeared in. Does anyone happen to know?

 

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by bécasse

[bécasse]

I was able to answer my own question once I realised that the newly expanded Railway Modeller online archive includes an excellent word search facility (which even covers advertisements). The drawing and accompanying text appeared on pages 348 and 349 of the July 1999 issue - so actually only a little over twenty years ago rather than thirty.

[Nearholmer]

Thank you for reminding me of that; definite "food for future plans", because I really like that building.

 

One curiosity of the drawing is that it shows the little porch over the door to the signalbox to be rendered/pedbbledashed, whereas it is plain brick, and all the photos on "disused stations" suggest that it always was. My surmise is that it was added at some stage to prevent rain blowing inside when the signalman went to and fro exchanging tokens.

 

There were several very neat little early-SR stations: this; those on the Marchwood line; ND&CJLtR (designed by the SR, but not owned by it, I think); and, there are probably small buildings at other places of similar dates. They must have had an architect on the team who had a good eye for "domestic scale" buildings. Newton Poppleford was another fairly late (1899) design, and also very neat. I wonder if the architect in question started on the LSWR and designed that too.

[bécasse]

One oddity of the building at Havenstreet, to be borne in mind if using it as a base for a model of a typical small SR station of the mid-1920s, is that it was built too low. The architect's drawings used a datum of rail-level, as was (is?) commonplace with railway buildings, but the builder assumed, when laying the foundations, that the datum was ground level. I suspect that the latter was probably at least a foot and possibly 18" lower. It didn't matter that much - it didn't lead to flooding, for example - but I believe that some difficulties were experienced in laying out the point-rodding, and it cost the SR's clerk of works his job for failing to spot the error until too late.

[bécasse]

15 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

One curiosity of the drawing is that it shows the little porch over the door to the signalbox to be rendered/pedbbledashed, whereas it is plain brick, and all the photos on "disused stations" suggest that it always was. My surmise is that it was added at some stage to prevent rain blowing inside when the signalman went to and fro exchanging tokens.

I couldn't find any photos either which might have suggested that it was pebble-dashed at any stage of its life and it certainly survived into the preservation era as plain brickwork. The article author does say that the drawing was "resurrected" long after he had measured up the building so his contemporary notes may have been illegible or misleading - I sometimes have the same problem with mine!

 

Looking at the style of the brickwork, I rather wonder whether the porch was added as an ARP (mainly to preserve blackout, which was taken very seriously in the IoW, the island having been subject to a naval blackout throughout WWI) and so dates from just before WWII.

[Nearholmer]

4 hours ago, bécasse said:

rather wonder whether the porch was added as an ARP

Yes, you could be right, it certainly has that look.

[bécasse]

The RM article states that, as built in 1926, the building had neither mains water nor mains electricity. Checking with IWSR sources confirms that it remained oil lit until BR closure in 1966 but by then a ½" pipe supplied mains water. It is inconceivable that the SR would have installed earth closets in 1926, so there must have been a well with a (presumably hand) pump filling tanks in the roof space, thus providing a daily chore for the early turn porter-signalman. With an hourly passenger train service crossing at the station, but no goods facilities located there, the daily routine would have divided into regular half-hourly periods of relative activity and non-activity, providing plenty of scope for undertaking other tasks such as pumping. No wonder it was a regular winner of the Island's best-kept station seat.