The birthplace of our heritage steam railways

IN A corner of Barry where the hand of regeneration has transformed the town’s dockland, echoes of the past are everywhere.

The 42m-high chimney of the historic Grade II-listed pumphouse looms large, providing welcome shade from the heatwave that has left Wales sweltering in its wake.

One of the last reminders of Barry Docks’ heyday during the early 20th century, Barry Pumping Station was built in the 1880s to provide hydraulic power to the docks when it was one of the largest coal-exporting ports in Wales.

Now it has been carefully restored to accommodate a cafe, restaurant, 24-hour gym and 15 live/work spaces.

Behind it, secreted away in a building which is half railway shed, half council offices, an equally important restoration project similarly reverberates with echoes of Barry’s industrial past – while celebrating one of its most famous landmarks.

There Mike Pearce, a silver-haired 77-year-old retired engineer, who has dedicated his life to rail preservation, greets me with a smile and leads me into the large railways sheds, the smell of grease and metal filling the air.

Standing proudly among the mechanical clutter of the sidings, are two relics of the past – the final two locomotives left facing restoration from the town’s fondly remembered Woodham’s Scrapyard. They are both a reminder of the past and a signifier of the continued attraction of rail preservation in the UK.

Nothing is left of the scrapyard today, but when it was established in 1892 as Woodham & Sons by Albert Woodham, the company was based at Thomson Street, Barry – a stone’s throw away from where we are stood.

The company bought old rope, wood and scrap metal from the ships, boats and marine businesses which used the newly created Barry Docks, which it then resold or scrapped. When Albert retired in 1947, his son Dai took over the business and renamed it Woodham Brothers.

However, for decades through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, until the business was wound down in 1990, it was synonymous with one thing – steam locomotives.

The rows of redundant engines that lined the yard were a picturesque sight for holidaymakers flocking to Barry Island.

Both it’s Mecca and its Lourdes, the story of Woodham’s is legend among rail enthusiasts. More than 80% of steam locomotives running on heritage railways in the UK can be traced back to Woodham’s, as the yard became a centre of pilgrimage for steam enthusiasts from the emerging steam railway preservation movement.

The facts of Woodham’s history are startling. Of the 297 withdrawn British steam locomotives that were sent to the yard, 213 were rescued for the developing railway preservation movement.

Taking a seat in a side office, cradling a cup of tea in his hands, Mike Pearce, one of those preservationists who in the 1970s spent endless hours and months at the scrapyard, underlines its importance to railway history, maintaining there wouldn’t be a rail preservation industry in the UK without Woodham’s.

“It would be a desert out there without the engines which were saved from scrappage from the yard,” he says.

“More than 80% of the locomotives running in the UK can be traced to Woodham’s. Without it, the landscape would look very different indeed.”

How Woodham’s came to earn the name “the locomotives’ graveyard” can be traced back to the huge British Rail modernisation programme in the late 1960s, when the introduction of new diesel engines sounded the death knell for steam trains.

“The very last steam engines ran on the mainline in Britain on August 11, 1968,” says Pearce, an acknowledged authority on steam railway history.

“August 4, 1968, was the day of the last public passenger locomotive. But on August 11 they ran what they called ‘15-guinea specials’ to mark the end of steam in Britain. These were a series of locos from Manchester to Liverpool, and that was the end of it.

“Gradually they eliminated steam all over Britain. Diesel came in to replace the steam locos, but it was a big rush, the government were hellbent on modernisation and they rushed headlong blind into buying untried and untested diesels – a lot of them were failures.”

A staggering number of steam engines were scrapped in that first wave of modernisation, but a peculiar quirk of contracts meant that most of the locomotives which arrived in Woodham’s in Barry were shunted into sidings, as the yard’s moniker “locomotives’ graveyard” was born.

“There were 20,000-30,000 engines that were scrapped in the UK over a very short period,” explains Pearce.

“A lot of the others were cutting them up as soon as they came in the yard, but Dai Woodham kept his because he had a massive wagon-breaking contract from British Rail, with thousands of wagons coming through the yard – it was a lot easier to break wagons up than steam engines.

“While there was still a significant number of steam locomotives in the yard, railway preservationists began buying the better examples from the late 1960s to restore them to working order.

“The peak period for the sale of the locomotives was in the 1970s, when in viduals and preservation societies put bids.”

As a result, rail preservationists flock to Barry as word of the “locomotiv graveyard” spread.

For those living close to the yard, spectacle of low-loaders carrying locom tives saved from the scrapheap to be their journey to a new life, where t would steam once more, was a comm sight.

According to Pearce, Dai Woodha who died in 1994, was ultimately a bu nessman, but one sympathetic to railw preservationists, holding locomotives e marked for sale for years while preser tion groups raised the thousands pounds needed to purchase them.

“Back then, I suppose on average in