BUSTITUTION? Just find another resort!
SEASIDE miniature and minimum gauge railways have long been a traditional feature of British resorts, and an elite few managed to enter the‘green’public transport category. A classic example was the 10¼in gauge Wells Harbour Railway, which linked the Norfolk town’s waterfront to Pinewoods Holiday Park and café and the main beach, saving visitors a three-quarter-mile walk, and also being an attraction in itself.
Despite a regular visitor collecting a petition signed by more than 52,000 wellwishers to save the line from closure after landlord Holkham Estates refused to renew the lease, its last train ran in September 21 – ending 45 years of history. The locomotives, rolling stock, track and turntables were bought by the Lappa Valley Railway at St Newlyn East, near Newquay, and shipped to Cornwall.
Holkham Estates has filled the public transport gap by this year introducing a pair of buses. One, an all-new vehicle, has been described as the UK’s first fully electric bus of its type. The second is an immaculate vintage open-top Leyland Tiger single dating from 1951, which began its working life transporting visitors around the Channel Islands.
The buses will run from April to October each year, from Wells Town FC’s car park to the roundabout at the beach end of Beach Road, leaving rail matters exclusively to the Wells & Walsingham Light Railway on the opposite side of the town, which had been subsequently developed to the same gauge by the late retired World War Two British naval officer Lieutenant-Commander Roy Francis.
The newest Wells Harbour locomotive, The Duke, an Alan Keef 0-6-0 diesel hydraulic built in 2014, and some of its carriages have this season been used on one of the Lappa Valley’s three lines, the 10¼in gauge Newlyn Downs branch, which during the coming months will be relaid using track from the Norfolk line.
A second 0-6-0DH, Densil, a steam outline locomotive built by Keef in 1998, is now running on the Watford Miniature Railway.
The third Wells Harbour locomotive, 2005-built Keef steam outline 0-6-0DH Howard, has now swapped coasts yet again – and under contract from the Lappa Valley has been playing an essential part in getting Dorset’s Poole Park Miniature Railway running.
This 10¼in gauge line, which dates from 1949 and is owned by Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole, had been closed since 2018 when 40 volunteers of the Friends of Poole Park, which had been given the lease to run the railway the previous year, walked out, as previously reported.
In May 2019, the local authority pledged £350,000 to the railway and appointed Shropshire-based Track Systems to prepare it for operation again.
The 700-yard line, using Howard while a new electric locomotive was still undergoing its final inspections, reopened to the public for trial running on Friday, September 2 and immediately had a train full of passengers.
However, services were suspended after a derailment involving Howard on September 10. The carriages were again full, but nobody was injured.
Railway staff said that stones had been placed on the track, and wondered whether vandals or a young child had been responsible for it.
A spokesman said: “The track is checked every morning and we’d been running since 9am, all fine.
“While we were back at the station picking up new passengers, just after 2pm, we think someone placed stones into the double tracks on the hard corner; it’s highly unlikely they got there by themselves. The stones can’t be seen by the driver and as he went over them the locomotive derailed.”
The railway reopened to the public the following day.