Missing ‘Lincs’
East Lincolnshire towns lost their bitter fight to save their railways in October 1970. HOWARD JOHNSTON witnessed the closures first-hand and reveals how ex-BR senior manager Gerry Fiennes organised the miracle rescue of one of the services
RAIL journeys into the past to discover how East Lincolnshire lost its railways - apart from a solitary survivor.
Dr Richard Beeching was given a public roasting for his mass closures of rural lines in the 1960s. But the recent chance discovery of internal British Rail documents gives a fresh insight into what a parlous state many of those lines were in.
Equally through poor management and better alternatives, passenger services across East Lincolnshire suffered wholesale withdrawal on October 4 1970 - half a century ago. While much has been published on the subject, some quite startling facts and figures - published here for possibly the first time - offer a new insight into what actually happened.
We can now better understand the vision of three local authorities to hire no-nonsense former Eastern Region General Manager Gerry Fiennes to take on his old British Rail adversaries - and win. This resulted in the
UK’s first publicly subsided reopening - the now thriving Spalding-Peterborough service.
But take pity on the isolated coastal resort of Mablethorpe, whose economy was wrecked by the closure of a line that had been run into the floor, but which was still considered viable to the very end.
And remember such romantic names as Mumby Road, Stixwould, Tumby Woodside, Old Bolingbroke and Midville. Often in the ‘middle of nowhere’, these stations all had four or five daily services - even though some of them only had one regular passenger.
This paints a picture of East Lincolnshire, which is perhaps best known for the resort of Skegness, underpinned by Butlin’s holiday camp. The rest of the sparsely populated area is given over to agriculture.
Until 1970, it was well served by railways. The main thread was the GrimsbyPeterborough ‘main line’, offering two daily locomotivehauled trains to London (with a buffet car), calling at (among others) the towns of Louth, Boston and Spalding.
There were also regular local stopping trains (normally Derby Class 114 two-car diesel multiple units). Firsby, 15 miles north of Boston, served as a junction for lines to Skegness and Lincoln, while another interchange at Willoughby linked the singletrack spur to Sutton-on-Sea and Mablethorpe.
Being so inflexible, the railway was easy prey to road competition, and the arrival of unregulated lorry transport from farm fields to town centres quickly captured all locally generated business.
Bus operators such as Lincolnshire Road Car and Eastern Counties collected passengers (those who did not already own a car) from doorsteps, while door-to-seafront coach trips proved popular with holidaymakers.
Realising their shortcomings, BR stripped
out most of the smaller wayside stations between Peterborough and Grimsby on September 11 1961, although not those on the branches because there would have been nothing left to sustain them. Those that survived were working museums right to the end, with somersault signals and original interior fittings and signage.
Something that BR could not save money on were the scores of manned level crossings, often open only to serve farmsteads. Manual signal boxes, sometimes with three shifts of men, existed in large numbers.
The turning point for change was BR’s survey of passenger business at every station for the week ending July 14 1963. The results were jaw-dropping in their starkness, and after public consultation and despite highly vocal public protest, formal closures of several routes were approved in 1964.
The Skegness service from Nottingham, Grantham and Boston survived, but all other investment was halted. The closures took another six years to implement.
Axed: WilloughbyMablethorpe
Over a long period, the resort of Mablethorpe was dealt worse hands than it deserved, because the railway was its lifeblood.
A favourite of local poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, it once had a through station on the full Willoughby-Louth loop, but was cut back to a 9¾-mile single branch from the East Lincs Main Line in December 1960.
Almost in hibernation during the winter, the line sprang to life every year with vast crowds of summer visitors from across the East Midlands and South Yorkshire.
However, one of its two intermediate stations, Sutton-on-Sea, did less well. And the other, Mumby Road, did practically no business at all. Despite five trains stopping there in 1967, the BR report shows that it only had one regular passenger, who caught the 0840 service to work in Mablethorpe (a journey of 14 minutes) and came back at 1054.
Today, local traders will still tell you BR openly admitted that Mablethorpe’s railway paid its way to the end, but that it could not survive without a main line to feed it.
They are also rattled that the ending in
1963 of a joint BR/local council agreement to promote the route with posters, timetables and leaflets destroyed what was left of the once-thriving excursion business. There were 160 special trains in the 1961 season (carrying around 60,000 passengers), but only 87 two years later.
Also by this time, a change in BR accountancy policy meant that the revenue from incoming trains was attributed to the source station, not the destination.
In one good example, the now closed Great Central station at New Basford (Nottingham) received the ticket money from the 842 passengers who arrived in Mablethorpe on one train on Saturday June 3 1963. And on August 18, Kibworth pocketed the income from a train carrying 978 passengers (there were four others that day).
Excursion traffic had almost completely collapsed by the time of the second ER survey in 1967, with only seven specials recorded as running between May 27 and September 9. Just 2,942 passengers arrived on the three trains from Mexborough and on one each from Kiveton Bridge, Lincoln, Gainsborough and Derby.
Mablethorpe’s popularly with Sheffield was still holding up, however, with an additional 0910 train from Sheffield bringing a total of 5,417 visitors between June 17 and September 2. The 1145 local extra from Boston (often with entirely unsuitable King’s Cross non-corridor suburban coaches) also did good business.
Today, there is no evidence that a railway even ran into Mablethorpe, with the station site now a car park and the once large coach sidings area lost to housing.
Axed: Lincoln-Firsby-Skegness
By 1970, this 32-mile scenic line running alongside the River Witham, and then through farmers’ fields, still had a regular service but practically no passengers.
The eastern section from Lincoln to Woodhall Junction was part of the original London-Scotland Great Northern main line, while the western part to Bellwater Junction (3¾ miles south of Firsby station) was not opened until 1913. It was a response to demands for more direct access to Skegness for excursions from Manchester and the East Midlands.
The stations listed to close were Five Mile House (unused because of its poor condition), Bardney, Southrey, Stixwould, Woodhall Junction, Coningsby, Tumby Woodside, New Bolingbroke, Stickney and Midville.
An operating curiously was the lack of a crossover at Coningsby (serving the air base), which meant that shuttle DMUs to and from Lincoln had to go on to Tumby Woodside to reverse. Thus, this tiny hamlet of no more than a couple of dozen people had an amazing number of trains.
For completeness, the stations onwards to Skegness were included in the 1967 survey, and four of them are still open in 2020.
The statistics are distorted by the running of two anglers’ specials from Sheffield every Saturday between June 17 and September 3 that year. On one occasion, 272 passengers alighted at Southrey, 278 at Stixwould, and 218 at Woodhall Junction.