A lost line… and a lost opportunity
Thirty-five years after the March to Spalding line closed, freight operators are still lamenting its loss. PIP DUNN travels the route to discover the surviving traces of a ‘what might have been’ line
In 2011, a new road opened from Spalding in Lincolnshire to the outskirts of Peterborough, providing a much-needed diversion from the inadequate road via Crowland and Cowbit. This new road dissected the trackbed of the old Spalding to March railway that had closed on November 27 1982, and in doing so opened up some new views of the old line.
Heading south towards Cowbit (once the locals have stopped laughing at you for calling it ‘Cow-bit’, they will tell you that it is actually pronounced ‘Cubbit’), if you look to your left you’ll see that the signalpost for the Up distant still stands. Thirty-five years since it last signalled a train, and bereft of arms, it serves as a reminder that there was once a railway here. Look to the right and you can just about make out a Down signalpost as well.
In fact, there are many railway relics on this line. If there was ever a TV programme called something like the (probably scheduled for 1800 on a Sunday on BBC2, and inevitably hosted by Tony Robinson or Mark Williams), which visited old closed railway lines looking for historical artefacts from its previous use, then March to Spalding really ought to be the opening show.
Few closed lines are as rich in remnants of the railway as this line. That might be because the 19¾-mile route ‘only’ closed in 1982, and was not part of the Beeching cuts. Maybe recovery of materials and demolition of infrastructure was not high on a then cash-strapped BR’s list of priorities. Maybe no one was overly bothered on clearing away the debris.
The line was opened by the Great Northern Railway in 1867. It amalgamated with the Great Eastern Railway in 1882 and was thereafter known as the ‘Joint Line’. At the 1923 Grouping it became part of the London and North Eastern Railway, and then British Railways from 1948.
There were intermediate stations at Cowbit (3½ miles from Spalding), Postland (7¼), French Drove (later named French Drove & Gedney Hill, 10½), Murrow (13¼) and Guyhirne (16). In later days, the approach to March (19¾) passed the massive Whitemoor marshalling yard, once the biggest in the UK.
The rundown of the line had started long before Beeching came to do his worst. Murrow station closed to passengers on September 27 1948, followed by Guyhirne five years later on October 5 1953. With the advent of the car, combined with this being a sparsely populated part of Lincolnshire, the stations at Cowbit, Postland and French Drove & Gedney Hill lost their passenger services on September 11 1961.
Despite the closure of the stations, the line retained a passenger service serving Spalding and March - as part of trains typically running from Cambridge to Lincoln or Doncaster. These were worked by diesel multiple units.
And the Joint Line came to life on Summer Saturdays, when holiday trains to Great Yarmouth would use the route to avoid the busy East Coast Main Line. Trains from Derby, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle would be routed via Sleaford and Spalding, then take the line to March to head into East Anglia. Some of these trains would change locomotives at Grassmoor, by Whitemoor Yard.
The line provided a useful means to move freight trains, especially those from the ports of East Anglia to the North East, keeping them away from the East Coast Main Line (ECML). This was especially useful for the long (and slow) unfitted freight trains which ran at 45mph, 35mph or even 25mph, and were hauled by slow locomotives such as Class 20s, ‘31s’, ‘37s’ and ‘40s’. This was to become a big issue shortly after the line closed.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, BR was under great pressure as the country suffered a major recession. It was also in desperate need of modernising (the last attempt in the 1950s had been badly thought out), with the use of vacuum brakes and steam heating which were archaic compared with electric train heating and air brakes.
As BR slowly eliminated these trains, so the demand for the line decreased. The passenger service was sparsely used, and next to useless anyway because of the times of trains, and because few people needed to travel directly between the two towns.
But there were two other (major) factors in hastening the line’s closure. Firstly, the line was incredibly antiquated. Because it was on the edge of the Fens, it was very flat - this meant numerous level crossings, many of them still protected by old gates which were closed and opened manually and so required crossing keepers. The line was still a haven of semaphore signals, with the associated signal boxes - and so staff. In short, staffing the line was hugely expensive for the level of traffic.
However, modernising the line was costed at £4 million - about £10m in today’s money. It was just not viable for the level (and nature) of traffic the line supported. Trains could still run between Spalding and March, but they would have to go the slightly longer way round via Peterborough - a distance of 31½ miles.
The downside was passengers had their 25-minute journey upped to over an hour, with a change at Peterborough of 20-plus minutes. However, not many people actually wanted to travel between March and Spalding anyway, so it only inconvenienced a few poor souls who did.
Some upgrading had been undertaken in the mid-1970s, with automatic half-barriers on a handful of the level crossings and even some sections of long-welded rail laid, but further upgrading was not deemed cost-effective.
A second factor which hastened the line’s demise was the desire to redesign the road layout at Guyhirn (the station, for some reason, had an ‘e’ at the end of it!). This new road layout would be cheaper to implement if the railway was not ‘in the way’.
It’s not clear if this was a driver in closing the line, or one of the benefits of closing it, but the early 1980s was a better time to be a supporter of road transport (passenger and freight) than it was to be a supporter of rail transport.
So, in 1982, with the country still in a recession, with BR suffering from the unions and their numerous strikes, losing freight hand over fist to a lean road haulage operation, and with a costly line in need of modernisation but with insufficient traffic to support that modernisation, the writing was (inevitably) on the wall. Closure came on November 27 1982 - a month after the initial planned closure due to ‘consultation with the unions’. On a cold, foggy and depressing November day, 115 years of railway history ended.
After the line closed, parts of the level crossing equipment were quickly removed. The Up line to March was lifted in the spring of 1983, although the Down line was retained just in case there was a case for reopening the line as a single-track freight-only route for a couple more years. Of course, that never happened - and it would have been costly to do so given the removal of signals and level crossing equipment.
So, in the spring of 1985, the Down line was lifted. And by July the job was done and the trackbed was handed over to nature. However, there was little rush to remove signal boxes, platelayers’ huts and even signals - and many of these survive today.
Indeed, travel to Spalding today and you might be surprised to see what still remains of the line. In Spalding itself, the bridge which carried the line over the River Welland remains. You can still see where the rails were fitted, although on both sides the trackbed has been built on with roads or houses. Along the line, many of the old gatehouses still survive as private dwellings - invariably called ‘The Old Gatehouse’.
The trackbed continues southeast, and a section is now a short road leading up to the A16 bypass. The section just after here is ‘sort of’ walkable. Unlike many closed lines, little of this trackbed was turned into an accessible bridleway or footpath. This section, flanked either side by fields, is private property but is still accessible, although it soon gets overgrown. Access to that signal post that still stands is really not possible… unless you are Bear Grylls.
The new road then crosses the line as it approaches Cowbit. Here the station, signal box and goods shed are all still standing.