According to Chris…
His grandchildren call him ‘Granddad Trains’ and he’s been a dedicated railway modeller since the 1960s but, despite popular legend, Chris Leigh doesn’t remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth!
With the arrival of our ‘J70’, Chris reminisces about the W&U tramway.
As delivery of the exclusive Model Rail ‘J70’ 0-6-0Ts becomes ever closer, I’ve become more and more engaged by the Wisbech & Upwell tramway. To be honest, it has fascinated me ever since I first saw Toby the Tram Engine in the Rev. W. Awdry’s ‘Thomas’ series. Wisbech, and the course of the tramway over six miles of Fenland roads to Upwell, is just a 40-minute drive from my home, so the temptation to go walkabout on a nice sunny day has occasionally proved too much to resist. There isn’t much left to see. Even before the tramway closed in spring 1966, the parallel Wisbech canal had been filled in. The tramway put the canal out of business by carrying the coal for the drainage pumping stations from Wisbech to Outwell, where it was loaded into lighters for the last few miles of its journey. When the Fenland drainage pumps switched to electric power, the tramway lost much of its inbound traffic. Outbound fruit and veg traffic switched to lorries in the post-war years, a change no doubt hastened by the 1955 national rail strike, when road hauliers grabbed the opportunity to tie shippers into long-term contracts. My research has provided a graphic illustration of many other changes that have taken place over the half-century since the tramway succumbed. In the days of tramway passenger trains, pre-1929, many of the stops and crossings were known by the names of nearby pubs – the Royal Standard, the Duke of Wellington and the Blacksmiths Arms, for example. Of these pubs, one is now a funeral parlour, another has been demolished and the third is a Chinese restaurant. The tramway itself was at the forefront of change when, in 1952, it became the first line in the country to be fully dieselised. Photographs show that the cowcatcher and sideplate-fitted Drewry 0-6-0DMS (later Class 04) hauled short or very short trains, compared to those seen behind the ‘J70s’ just a few years earlier. Traffic was ebbing away. The same photographs show that from the early 1960s the canal was being filled in. With little environmental awareness in those days, it was a convenient place to tip landfill, with a thin covering of soil which, 50 years on, limits its usefulness. Its loss has inevitably changed the look of many locations, and the more rural stretches of the in-filled canal are now curious long strips of green between two parallel roads which were once on either bank of the canal. Knowing that everything at the Upwell end has been built over, I started my research by going walkabout around Wisbech. The first location of significance was New Common Bridge, where the road and tramway crossed the Wisbech canal. The canal was disused for decades before being filled in during the 1960s. Today, a dual carriageway road occupies the site and the New Common Bridge name has disappeared from use, there being merely a five-way crossroads on the site. In steam days, there was a handsome little grocer’s shop beside the bridge. I hoped to find it was still there but, alas, I was to be disappointed. A newer building, now a private dwelling but still with the shop owner’s name visible on the front, occupies the site. My model of the shop (above) has been pieced together from illustrations in books, none of which show the building in its entirety. There’s no substitute for practice, however, and my experience of making some 14 buildings for ‘Polwyddelan’ has proved invaluable in making H.B. Brown’s store. I’m seldom entirely pleased with my modelling efforts – one can always do better – but I find this one pretty satisfactory. Now to build the layout to put it on.
The tramway itself was at the forefront of change when it became the first line in the country to be fully dieselised