Wandle Valley Light Railway

[nomisd]

Like a boxer who is punch drunk and doesn’t know when to give up, I have decided to try (yet) again. Into my sixth decade I am still yet to finish one of my model railways. My last one got near but not quite. I can’t leave it though. Having had a few goes at this, this time I come prepared….

 

First things first – what are the things that I really enjoy about this hobby? I came up with coming up with back stories and building plastic kits. I do love a good structure kit. Trouble is that many of these are usually of German and American origin and out of scale for building a UK layout. Thing is though, if you go big you can sort of get away with it. So go big. Fortunately there are a lot of really good plastic rolling stock kits so that is a route that can be gone down. I also really enjoy dirtying up those kits.

 

However what I can’t do is build brass. I have tried and I have failed. This is a shame as there are a lot of locos that I desire that only come in brass (including a couple I have had flat packed for more than a decade now). So why so many brass locos? Well my penchant for the prototype sort of dictates it – industrial railways. Obviously the last decade has seen RTR locos for this come on in leaps and bounds. No longer do you have to use an 03 as a an ex BR loco that has been sold into industry (although there were many of these so it is prototypical). However, the manufacturer who does a RTR 165DE Ruston can have my money now.

 

Like so many others I have been having a home sort out recently and have come across some wagons that I have had but never used in anger for around two decades now. They are three Bachmann Blue Grain wagons, a Bass box van and open made by Dapol as a special edition for the Tutbury Jinny in the 2000s, a Hornby box van and a couple of Dapol 16T open kits. It was all for a brewery that never left the drawing board. Its not like they were forgotten about but actually opening the boxes and looking at them started the cogs a whirring.

 

What I also still have are the four baseboards, all about 4ft by 2ft designed to go together in a line giving a 16ft by 2ft board. I had these built about 15 years ago by someone in Kent who advertised in the small ads of Railway Modeller – if I am honest, they are possibly the best thing I have ever invested money in as far as modelling goes. They are beautiful, solid and bullet proof. I will probably put new tops on them, the sundela has already had two layouts of it and is starting get a bit ropey and uneven. I also rescued the points from the last attempt and have a fair bit of flex track left unused (perhaps the second best thing I have ever purchased a whole box of Peco Code 75 flex track).

 

I started looking around at what I could do. It had to check the industrial box, grain wagon box and use big buildings. I started idly looking at kits on the web. I kept being drawn back to Walthers grain silo kits. They do two nice looking kits – what you could describe as the typical wooden prairie style and a concrete twin silo. I decided to pull a book off the shelf which I knew had some reference material in it – Modelling BR Blue Era by xxxxx. This is an all round excellent book with a lot of good reference material on it. The freight operation chapter has a very good part about grain traffic. A small detail in it caught my attention – one of the places with grain traffic was the Derwent Valley Light Railway. Hmmm, a light railway…admittedly its not industrial but its adjacent. This set a whole new set of ideas pinging around.

 

One of which was motive power. As already stated, the choice of industrial diesel locos has become much more broad over the last few years. If you are going to operate a light railway you would need something fairly substantial – whilst the Hornby 48DS Ruston is a beautiful model, it wouldn’t really be a “mainline” loco, something with a bit more heft would be needed. The Hornby Sentinel would work and the Golden Valley Janus would definitely work. Whilst looking at the online sellers websites, I saw a loco that made me stop in my tracks and completely rethink – the Heljan Class 15. The thing about was its shape – BTH had almost copied the US designs of 1000hp locos like the Fairbanks Morse H-12-44s and the Baldwin RS-12s. The American locos had been extensive used on their equivalent of the UK light railway, the shortline. Had Britain had more independent light railways around the time BR was divesting itself of its unwanted Type 1 locos, they would have almost found a home on them.

 

So along with the grain silo and a class 15, various other wagon kits and buildings have been ordered and delivery is imminent. I haven't got a track plan yet (but have a rough one on my head) but  I can’t see any track laying occurring this winter however plenty of kit building, painting and weathering will be happening. So here is the back story…comments are of course welcome.

[nomisd]

The Wandle Valley Light Railway – Britain’s Last Light Railway

 

Located in the north Midlands, the six mile long line from Winterstoke to Summersend was built by a locally formed company in 1856. From its opening it was operated by the Grand Central Railway (GCR) and originally ran from the GCR station in Winterstoke. This station eventually closed and operations were transferred to the joint GCR/Great North Western Railway (GNWR) station in the town. In 1921 the GCR and GNWR were amalgamated to become the London North Midland Railway, this in turn became the North Midland Region of the nationalised British Railways in 1948.

 

The branch to Summersend became an early closure casualty after nationalisation and it closed in 1950. As recorded L T C Rolt’s seminal 1954 biography of the area, there was much local anger about this. Unfortunately Rolt’s history was published too early to detail the next and most interesting chapter of the Summersend branch. The anger did not subside and continued for the next three years. In March 1953 the cinema in Winterstoke began showing the latest release from the Ealing Studios, The Titfield Thunderbolt. Whilst watching it a Mr R M Kelling had an idea – why not campaign to reopen the Summersend line using a Light Railway Order?

 

Despite having been closed for three years, the track had been left in place. Rather than leaving the cinema and heading for the loco shed in an attempt to re-create the film, Kelling wrote a letter to the local paper putting forward the idea and suggesting a public meeting to discuss it. This happened a couple of weeks later and was well attended. The snowball had begun its journey down the mountain.

 

One of the things that gave the project impetus was the involvement of the Wandle Valley Farmers Co-operative (WVFC). The arable farmers in the area had begun investing in large-scale barley growing during the war years. They had been some of the loudest voices against the original closure. They put forward a plan to redevelop the basic goods shed that lay just beyond Summersend station. This involved the building of a grain silo, a petrol and diesel trans-shipment facility and a new goods shed. In addition to this the coal merchant would be relocated. The grain silos would have barley delivered by road from the farms and sent out by rail to the local brewery, Blenkinsop’s Entire, and to any other customers they could find further afield. The fuel facility would receive inward deliveries in tank wagons, which would be transferred to storage tanks; this could then be supplied to local farmers and other customers. The goods shed was for merchandise destined for WVFC, mainly fertilisers and agricultural equipment but any other customer could avail themselves of the facility.

 

It was decided to form the Wandle Valley Light Railway (WVLR, although the Winterstoke Summersend Light Railway was also considered) and to apply for the reopening of the branch under a LRO, Much to everyone’s surprise, this was granted rather rapidly in June 1955. Building work began immediately on the new facilities at Summersend. Rolling stock would be leased from BR but operated by WVLR. The stock was made up of any life expired stock hat BR could muster up, mainly ex GCR and GNWR locos. These were maintained at the BR shed at Winterstoke by WVLR staff. The line was reopened to much pomp and circumstance in February 1956.

 

To begin with they were operated by ex GNWR steam railmotors (Beyer, Peacock products similar to those supplied to the North Staffordshire Railway and the LBSCR). Occasional a push pull train operated by ex GCR locos similar to the ex L&YR Class 5 2-4-2Ts with ex GCR push pull sets was substituted. An interesting working was a morning outbound and evening return through carriage to London. This was worked by a single coach (sometimes strengthened to two) and attached/detached to/from a London train at Winterstoke. An evening London bound parcels/post working ran with a similar working arriving in the morning along with newspapers from London.  Freight operations were operated by locos obtained from BR in the same way. These were mainly large tank engines, which were all similar to the LNWR 1185 class and Precursor Tanks class locos.

 

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, the reopening of the Summersend branch as the WVLR was turning out to be a good thing, with freight and passenger traffic growing year on year. Summersend was becoming something of a suburb of Winterstoke and the passenger trains between the two had become well patronised at all times of the day. The freight operations were strong with two harvests of barley a year. The main threat to the line came from the imminent withdrawal of steam from the British mainline system. BR had informed WVLR following the withdrawal of the steam from mainline services in August 1968, they could no longer use steam traction on the railway and would have to move to diesel traction. BR had also offered to maintain the current leasing agreement. However the board of the WVLR approached BR with a counter offer.

 

They enquired as to whether it was possible that they could purchase their own locomotives that they could maintain and operate on the line. The WVLR suggested that the large number of shunting and Type 1 locos that were becoming surplus to BRs requirements would be ideal for their use. BR agreed and in the late 1960s and early 1970s WVLR purchased a surprisingly large number of redundant locos from BR (and other sources, mainly industrial users). This kept some interesting prototypes working long after their mainline demise.

 

In the early 1980s the barley traffic remains strong, even after Blenkinsops has been purchased and become part of the Bass empire. There are still flows of traffic to Scottish distillers – even though this is often rumoured to be shifting to road, it is something that never actually seems came to fruition. The fuel terminal sees regular traffic. The passenger services have switched to ex BR DMUs but the daily through coach to and from London and the postal, parcels and papers service still run every weekday. The lines motive power is starting to get a bit long in the tooth but the large scale withdrawal from BR of the Type 2 locos promises a new supply of locos for the line. With the closure of the Derwent Light Railway in 1981, the WVLR became the last independently operated light railway in the country. Its future looks safe.

 

Extract from the Railway World, April 1983