■ Virtual celebration of Wight steam is big hit online

AROUND 80,000 people watched the start of the Isle of Wight Steam Railway’s 50th anniversary celebrations on January 24 – but very few of them were on the island for the occasion.

With the UK in lockdown and local coronavirus infection rates rising – before Christmas, the island was one of only three areas of

England designated Tier 1, the lowest lockdown category – the event was marked by a small private ceremony at Havenstreet station, and broadcast over social media.

Viewers watched the line’s flagship 1891-builot LSWR O2 0-4-4-T No. 24 Calbourne publicly return to steam, following the completion of its overhaul and repainting into Southern Railway malachite green livery.

It was 50 years to the day when crowds of well-wishers flocked to Newport station and lined the line to Havenstreet to witness the town’s last trains.

As highlighted in the first part of Phil Marsh’s feature on 50 years of the heritage line which appeared in our last issue, in the late 1960s the fledgling Wight Locomotive Society assembled a collection of rolling stock and Calbourne, the island’s sole remaining O2, at Newport station. In 1967 the newly-formed society had bought it for £900.

Revival

At the time, hopes of a revival of the route rested on the Vectrail scheme which aimed to restore services to Ryde to Cowes line using lightweight railcars.

Sadly, as elsewhere throughout Britain and beyond at the time, road traffic again won the day, as the section through Newport was destined to become the town’s bypass, and the preservation society had to find a new home at Havenstreet, well away from potential developers.

In January 1971 the group was given just one week’s notice to move everything to Havenstreet before scrap merchants started to lift the track. To get there, the heritage trains needed to run over five miles of track that had become heavily overgrown since closing five years earlier, and at Wootton, torrential rain had washed away part of the trackbed, leaving the rails suspended above a sea of mud.

“Until the first train had got across, nobody really knew whether it was possible,” said volunteer John Woodhams, who as a 15-years-old schoolboy worked to clear vegetation from the tracks and is now a driver on the line.

“After all the uncertainty and destruction we’d experienced at Newport, there was a feeling of hope and new beginnings that we could establish a railway at Havenstreet.”

Four trains ran that day, hauling the society’s carriages and historic wagons to their new permanent base. The final train departed in

darkness, whistle blazing as it crossed the Medina viaduct for the last time, signalling the end of 109 years of railway history at Newport.

Celebration

A series of events are planned to mark the 50th birthday. An anniversary gala weekend on June 4-6 is set to feature three original island engines in Calbourne and LBSCR 'Terriers' W11 Newport and Knowle (formerly No. W14 Bembridge), the latter visiting from the Kent & East Sussex Railway.

The anniversary is also being showcased in a new online exhibition, titled Off The Rails.

The exhibition, run in conjunction with Quay Arts, employs artefacts, signs and memorabilia from the line’s collection. It was originally intended that the exhibition would be hosted at Quay Arts’ West Gallery at Newport Harbour, but those plans were scuppered by lockdown.

To expand the exhibition online, Quay Arts invited artists to submit work based around preservation, displacement and memory, along with wider themes on travel, engineering and movement.

Furthermore, artist-educator Ian Whitmore worked with the island’s Oakfield CE and Gurnard primary schools to explore the line’s heritage, and created work in response in the form of two mosaic collages and a stop-frame animation film.

Rare footage of the final move to Havenstreet also features in the exhibition. Quay Arts’ visual arts manager Georgia Newman and Havenstreet’s museum curator John Paton have recorded a discussion, highlighting works in the exhibition and its wider themes.

The exhibition runs until Saturday, March 20 and can be viewed at www. quayarts.org/off-the-rails-onlineexhibition/

Planning for the future across the Solent – the second part of our special anniversary feature. See pages 78-83.

Watched by more than 80,000 people from their computer screens, newlyoverhauled and repainted Isle of Wight Steam Railway flagship No. W24 Calbourne steams at Havenstreet on January 24 to mark the start of the heritage line’s 50th anniversary celebrations and its own 130th birthday year. The railway had launched a £24,000 appeal to help fund the overhaul, but the locomotive’s popularity saw more than £40,000 raised. JOHN FAULKNER/IOWSR

January 24 saw a replication of an iconic photograph from the embryonic days of the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. The black and white image was taken at Whippingham station in 1971, with driver Tom ‘Jacko’ Jackman handing a despatch bag containing a commemorative letter to the Queen to the island’s MP Mark Woodnutt on No. W24 Calbourne. Both men are deceased. Bob Huxtable, George Wheeler, Marion Hunnisett and David Perry look on from the platform; all four are still with us and involved at the heritage line today. The 2.35pm from Newport was the last train ever to call at Whippingham, said to have been the most underused station on an often sparsely used island network. It was built because of the need to have a station near Osborne House. Queen Victoria used the station at least once, on February 11, 1888, when she travelled from Whippingham to Ventnor and back for the opening of the National Consumption Hospital there. The station is also known to have been used by the young Lord Mountbatten. The modern-day picture shows driver Alex Hull with the line’s chairman Peter Conway with the original bag containing the letter to the Queen, as operations manager Clive Miller and events officer Liz Tagart look on. When restrictions have eased, it is hoped that the four surviving members from the 1971 picture, and others who helped on the day, will be able to properly celebrate their achievement on the line. IOWSR

As it was 50 years ago: LSWR O2 No. W24 Calbourne heads out of Newport on January 24, 1971. J ARTHUR DIXON/IOWSR