THE LONDON, BRIGHTON & SOUTH WARWICKSHIRE RAILWAY!

Light railway builder Colonel Holman Fred Stephens was, depending on your perspective, a man behind his time whose vision of budget- priced rural railways came too late, or a visionary and forerunner of today’s heritage railway portfolio, in which second-

EDGE Hill, an escarpment in the parish of Ratley and Upton in Warwickshire, is best known as the setting for the first major battle of the English Civil War. On Sunday, October 23, 1642, the Royalist forces of Charles I and the Parliamentarian army commanded by the Earl of Essex clashed here. The battle proved inconclusive, with both sides claiming victory.

The following year, following reports of ghostly sightings published by a printer, Thomas Jackson, the King sent a royal commission to visit the site, where two phantom armies were said to have been seen fighting in the sky above them.

Three centuries later, Edge Hill again became a graveyard, and the ghostly remains of a railway which many people believe never should have been built.

Just like the battle, the outcome of the Edge Hill Light Railway ( EHLR) remained very much unfinished business: its construction was suspended with such apparent haste that after a lapse of several years, the mechanical excavator which had been used to build it was still to be found with its grab half- raised to load a bucketful of earth!

This 3 ½ - mile line was promoted in association with the Stratford- upon- Avon & Midland Junction Railway ( SMJR), which was formed in 1909 by the merger of three earlier companies: the East and West Junction Railway, the Evesham, Redditch & Stratfordupon- Avon Junction Railway, and the Stratford- upon- Avon, Towcester, & Midland Junction Railway.

In 1910, the Northampton & Banbury Junction Railway was purchased and an eastwest network was formed, which linked routes to Bedford and Northampton in the east to lines leading towards Banbury and Gloucester in the west, via Towcester and Stratford.

The three constituent railways had each been built with a view to carrying Northamptonshire iron ore to South Wales and the West Midlands, but they were all unable to finance their planned lines in full. The formation of the SMJR in 1909 was in effect a financial reconstruction, but the management of the combined company also showed a certain flair for generating tourist income, based on the connection with Shakespeare and also the family connections with George Washington. Furthermore, the line was developed as a shorter route for Midland Railway goods traffic from the Bristol area to London.

The EHLR had its origin in the opening- up of the rich ironstone deposits which have been known for many centuries to exist in this part of the South Midlands,

First World War requirements intensified the demand for British ironstone, and the EHLR