Dr Beeching not to blame for closure
For the record, ‘Railway Doctor’ Richard Beeching was not an enemy of North West Norfolk, as the Hunstanton line was not on his hit list. It features clearly on his 1963 retention map.
The closure decision was taken by Labour Transport Minister Barbara Castle, after severe operating economies and a nosedive reduction in service quality drove passengers away. She refused a Social Railway grant because the annual losses had risen to an unacceptable £40,000 a year by 1968 (almost £ 500,000 in today’s money).
British Railways had actively turned away the holidaymakers that were the lifeblood of the King’s Lynn-Hunstanton by cutting out through trains. They also diverted 80% of its revenue overnight by adjusting the accounts, tore up track to prevent excursions running, and allowed all the stations to become vandalised ruins by laying off staff in favour of conductor guards.
Peter Wakefield, vice-chairman of Railfuture East Anglia, has told campaigners: “It’s safe to say that in 1969 we threw away an asset that today could be worth £150m.”
A cursory glance at the rundown of the route between 1960 and its total closure nine years later reveals a startling list of actions that
RAIL readers might well associate with routes elsewhere in the UK that were dealt the same treatment at this time.
Hunstanton, a slightly genteel but highquality resort on the northwestern tip of Norfolk facing The Wash, is a Victorian version of the New Town. Pre-dating Skelmersdale, Stevenage, Newton Aycliffe, Corby, Basildon, Milton Keynes, Telford, Runcorn and Cumbernauld by many years, it was a table-top creation to stimulate new housing and prosperity.
It began when wealthy local landowner Henry Styleman LeStrange speculatively built the Golden Lion hotel (still in business) on windswept land close to the cliffs. He needed business, and building a railway was a quick route to growth. He enlisted partners to promote the Lynn & Hunstanton Railway Company, which incorporated in 1861, a year before his early death at just 47.
The ambition was to link up with the Great Eastern Railway at King’s Lynn to provide fast connections to London and East Anglia. Mapping out the Hunstanton line virtually on the level meant that rapid progress could be made with construction, and it opened on October 3 1862, just ten months after the first sod had been dug, and also within its £ 80,000 budget. The profusion of new holiday homes made it a success from the outset.
Rail users enjoyed the cheap day return excursions from London and the East Midlands, and evening expresses that allowed for long distance commuting even though it took three hours (ironically about the same as today, including the car/journey to King’s Lynn), and many of them included restaurant cars. Pre-war, there were more than a dozen services at weekends, justifying platform extensions, expanded terminus buildings, and extra carriage sidings added.
In the peak summer season in the 1930s, the line (of which only the first six-and-ahalf miles north from Lynn to Wolferton were double track), was traversed by a dozen locomotive-hauled excursions in a single day, so many that the operating staff developed a system of sending them all north in the
British Rail diverted 80% of the line’s revenue overnight by adjusting the accounts, and tore up track to prevent excursions running.
morning, parking them up, and returning them south in succession at teatime. Somehow, local stopping services and freight were slotted in between, making full use of the long passing loops.
The decline began with the closure of the Midland & Great Northern cross-country route from Leicester to King’s Lynn (and onto Norwich and Great Yarmouth) on February 28 1959, cutting off a host of important connections at a stroke, particularly the East Midlands.
It is wrong to state that the growth of private motor car use, and road coaches, were wholly responsible for the rapid decline in business. The axing of through services from London Liverpool Street from November 1960, officially to use the rolling stock elsewhere, was the turning point, because holidaymakers now had to change at King’s Lynn for an inferior all-stations DMU. They might not choose to do that twice.
As noted author and researcher Stanley Jenkins explains, over 210,000 passengers were logged as arriving at Hunstanton station in 1960, and the ticket office also issued 44,000 tickets to local people heading south. But then the rules were changed.
Was BR Eastern Region management deliberately massaging the figures with a sinister motive? New accounting procedures slashed the official annual patronage by over 80% by disallowing arrivals. Why were revenues logged at Liverpool Street, Cambridge or Bedford ignored, when it was clear that they were also generating business for North West Norfolk? Blame certainly does not rest with ER general manager Gerry Fiennes and Norwich divisional manager Claude Hankin. They oversaw a cost-cutting exercise to keep the line open, including pioneering minimum-cost ‘Paytrains’ and staff reductions. However, the BR board was having none of it.
Dieselisation of most East Anglian local services had taken place in 1955 with the arrival of two-car Derby ‘Lightweight’ DMUs, which were declared non-standard in 1968 and withdrawn in favour of equally clappedout Gloucester RC&W Class 100 units redundant from closures in Scotland. Their internal condition was memorably deplorable; works attention was possibly at a minimum because it was known they would soon also become surplus and making their own oneway journey to the breaker’s yard.
The lifting of the double track section between King’s Lynn and Wolferton in spring 1967 effectively turned the line into a 15-mile siding, and there was a simultaneous loss of passing loops, signalboxes (left in situ with unsightly broken windows and rusty levers), although a couple of crossings optimistically went over to automatic half barrier operation.
Further signs of dereliction and disinterest were the ripping out of the carriage stabling facilities at Hunstanton, leaving only one track into a central platform. Even the once prestigious Sandringham Hotel, just beyond the end of the buffer stops, and bought by the local council after the war, was bulldozed.
Closure day was May 3 1969 - right at the start of the summer season - and in common with other lines across the country, efforts by local groups to run the line could not keep pace with demolition contracts.