Run a brake van railtour at home
Chris Leigh investigates the subject of brake van railtours which, would you believe, he’s just too young to remember!
Lots of railway enthusiasts have a problem with when they were born. Over the years I’ve talked to many who would start a conversation about trains with the words, “I was just too young to…” I was certainly just too young to enjoy “the heyday of the branch line railtour. I saw one or two, however. I recall Adams Radial 4-4-2T No. 30582 coming to Staines Central, far from its native haunt on the Lyme Regis branch. It took water at Staines before heading its three LSWR coaches down the branch to Windsor. I even persuaded my dad to photograph it!
A while later my brother and I hopped on one of the new Greenline Routemaster buses to Hampton Court to see a pair of Beattie Well tanks arrive with a railtour. I photographed Flying Scotsman
passing my home with a main line railtour and also ‘Britannia’, No. 70020 Mercury,
which was not a class with which I was familiar. To return, however, to the subject of branch line tours, the last steam-hauled tour I saw was the visit by 0-6-0PT No. 9773 to Staines West in summer 1965. After that I travelled on a couple of branch line tours but they were with DMUS, the most memorable being one which covered the Fairford branch as far as Witney and the Oxford-princes Risborough line as far as its terminus at Littlemore. I had been lucky enough to traverse the whole of that single-track route a few years earlier behind No. 7029
Clun Castle on a diverted ” return trip from one of the Welsh narrow gauge lines. What I had missed by being just that bit too young was taking part in tours to obscure, little-used and freight-only branches. In the late 1950s there were lots of these but they tended to be closed and lifted in the early 1960s, despite the fact that Beeching’s activities created a few more. The latter were mostly short-lived and by that time railtours were more aimed at the market for ‘last run of this or that main line steam class’ than wandering down some branch line that, until recently, had been properly served by passenger trains.
Most branch line railtours were organized by enthusiast clubs, such as the Railway Enthusiasts Club (REC) based in Farnborough, the Gloucester Railway Society (GRS) or local branches of the nationwide Locomotive Club of Great Britain (LCGB). What made these clubs able to organize successful railtours to obscure places was usually the fact that they had, as members, BR personnel in positions of influence.
What I had missed by being too young was taking part in tours to obscure, little-used and freight-only branches
Organisation was often done on a very local basis, using locomotives and stock that was idle on a Saturday, when most tours ran. One can only speculate about the pricing and ticketing aspects.
The website Six Bells Junction is a detailed and ever-expanding record of railtours. If you know either the date or the name of the railtour, you can usually track down a lot more detail and possibly even some photographs.
It was from the tours of more obscure branch lines that the sub-hobby of ‘trackbashing’ seems to have grown. For a track basher, the object was to travel every inch of the most obscure railways, freight lines and even sidings. This would mean travelling lines which had never had a passenger service, were unsuited to passenger trains or had curves and clearances which could not accommodate bogie vehicles.
For such routes, some rather special railtours had to be organised. For instance, when Cambridge University Railway Club organized a trip over the Wisbech & Upwell tramway, the passengers travelled in open coal wagons! Usually, however, slightly more commodious accommodation was provided in four-wheeled goods brake vans. These offered the luxury of a verandah from which photographs could be taken and also provided the undoubted safety benefit of being vacuum-braked. This was an important consideration when carrying large numbers of people on lines which sometimes had steep inclines and winding curves.
The latter was particularly true of the Forest of Dean, where coal mining had prompted a network of mineral railways and the Severn & Wye Railway had been developed from a horse-worked plateway in order to access them. With its main route linking the two rivers in its title, from Lydbrook, on the Wye, to Lydney on the Severn, by way of Cinderford and Coleford, the main engineering feature was the iconic bridge over the Severn by which it reached the coal docks at Sharpness. Its 22 spans included a swing bridge over the Gloucester canal.
SEVERN SINS
An autotrain service latterly operated between Lydney and Sharpness, across the bridge, but in October 1960 two barges broke away from their moorings and, carried on the strong tide, struck the bridge, bringing down two spans. Five men were killed in the accident and although BR intended to rebuild the bridge, further accident damage pushed the estimated cost too high and it was eventually demolished. Photographer Trevor Owen photographed the Severn bridge on a number of occasions before and after the accident and took some great pictures on the Forest of Dean lines. It was the chance purchase of a couple of his original slides that led me to a brake van railtour called ‘The Severn Boar’. I like the inventive title. The Severn Bore is a curious tidal phenomenon, which occurs when a strong tidal flow forces its way into the funnel-shaped mouth of the river Severn, against the flow of the river. It produces a bore, or wave, which can reach as far up the river as Gloucester. Clearly, to use the word
‘bore’ in the railtour name might give a false impression of lack of excitement, so the spelling of an animal much associated with the Forest of Dean was used instead. At the time of the railtour, however, wild boar had been extinct in the Forest of Dean for some 300 years. They were accidentally reintroduced in the 1990s and there is now a thriving feral population.
According to Six Bells Junction, the ‘Severn Boar’ ran twice on June 6 and June 20 1964, because demand was so great. It seems to have been limited to six brake vans each time but I am not sure how many participants could be accommodated per brake van. It was probably eight or ten per van based on how many could ride on the verandahs at any one time. ‘The Severn Boar’ started and ended at Gloucester Central and took in all the existing Severn & Wye Railway lines, including the colliery sidings and the Sharpness line as far as Severn Bridge station.
Trevor Owen photographed the railtour on June 20 1964 when it was formed of six brake vans, three BR 20ton vans and three of LMS design. Motive power is listed as ‘16XX’ 0-6-0PTS Nos. 1658 and 1664 both of which are featured among the Model Rail/rapido Trains exclusive ‘OO’ models. On the first occasion, No. 1664 failed, and the train was worked throughout by 1658. I suspect a top-and-tail operation might have been intended on some of the minor branches and sidings, to avoid running round.
Unlike the main line railtours which often received widespread advance publicity, most brake van tours seem to have been arranged at local level and routes and timings were not well publicised. As a result, Six Bells Junction sometimes shows scant information for brake van tours. That is certainly so where another of my recent picture purchases is concerned. Captioned simply as ‘Lakes Coast Railtour’ it consisted of at least 11 brake vans. What appears to be the hood end of a Clayton Type 1 (Class 17) can be seen in the photograph, which would seem to confirm that the ‘lakes’ in the railtour name are those of the English Lake District. No other information has come to light so far.
Another of Trevor Owen’s photographs depicts L&YR ‘Pug’ 0-4-0ST No. 51218 with a tour to Manchester’s Trafford Park on May 21 1967 organised by Roch Valley Railway Society and the LCGB.