RAIL fares expert Barry Doe looks at the route from Weymouth that never officially closed.
PAUL Clifton’s article in RAIL 916 detailed the demise of the Weymouth Harbour line. I was at Weymouth on October 30 and took the accompanying photo, which shows something perhaps many people don’t realise - that track in the road is proper track on sleepers.
Some readers asked me that if the last train to use the line ran in May 1999 (and the last scheduled service serving a Channel Islands ferry was on September 26 1987), when did the route officially close?
The answer is that it never did officially close. That wasn’t an error, but permission was granted to avoid it.
Today’s Transport Focus is the successor to what, in British Rail days, had been the Central Users’ Consultative Committee. It had regional bodies, called Transport Users Consultative Committees (TUCCs).
It was the TUCCs that dealt with closures. I was privileged to be a member of the Southern TUCC for about four years in the late 1980s, and it was during that time that we had an unusual request from what was then Network SouthEast (NSE).
It wanted to discontinue the Weymouth Boat Trains, simply because they were no longer needed. However, it didn’t want to go through a closure motion in case ferry traffic increased.
Normally, disuse of a line implied the need for closure. If that wasn’t permitted by the then Minister of Transport, some form of ‘Parliamentary service’ would have been required.
Our committee had an excellent working relationship with NSE, and we agreed that it could remain out-of-use until required by ferries.
Readers might not appreciate the rapid decline in ‘classic’ foot passenger traffic on the Weymouth to Jersey and Guernsey service. For much of the year there were both day and night services, and in the late 1960s two trains ran from Waterloo to Weymouth Quay on summer Saturdays a mere 20 minutes apart, with one even having a restaurant car!
These both fed into the one daytime crossing. Yes, two trains were needed to cope with the numbers travelling.
The journey time from Waterloo to Jersey was ten hours, but fares were relatively cheap. In the following few decades, many drove to Weymouth to take their cars on the ship, and even more found it was far faster to take the train to Southampton Airport and then the 45-minute flight - probably hiring a car on arrival.
After through trains finished, tickets from London to the Channel Islands via Weymouth continued, and gave a free taxi transfer from the station to the Quay.
However, I was told that on most days nobody ever asked for a taxi. Even on summer
Saturdays it might be half-a-dozen people at most - compared with the 600+ in the 1960s.
It’s therefore not surprising that even with the transfer to Condor High Speed catamarans after the demise of classic ships, through traffic remained negligible and the line was never again needed.
It remained in Network Rail ownership, until it recently transferred to Dorset County Council so that it could lift the track. But closure wasn’t required owing to its not having been used for so many years, with the rules having changed in the 2005 Railways Act.
Finally, on the subject of ports, I noted the letter in RAIL 926’s Open Access suggesting a tunnel to the Isle of Wight.
I have a 1924 Ward & Lock Guide to the IoW, and it shows a proposed tunnel to West Wight from the Lymington branch.
I gather a bill went to Parliament in 1905 for this - a spur from roughly the midpoint of the Brockenhurst-Lymington branch to near Keyhaven on the coast, where a three-mile tunnel was to have surfaced and joined the IoW rail network between Yarmouth and Freshwater.
Lack of funds after the First World War inevitably led to the plan being dropped (albeit officially not until 1930).
But had it been built, it would have led to the main rail axis from London to the Isle of Wight being via Brockenhurst, rather than using ferries via Portsmouth or Southampton.
It would also have ensured the retention of the IoW rail network. As it was, YarmouthNewport closed in 1953 and Newport itself lost rail services in 1966 - just a year before the Ryde to Shanklin route was electrified.