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The Wye Valley Railway
opened on the 1st November 1876, linking the south-east Welsh
towns of Chepstow and Monmouth (then both in England) via stations
serving the villages of Tidenham, Tintern, St Briavels and Redbrook.
The line was 14¾ miles long. At Monmouth Troy station
passengers could change for trains serving the towns of Pontypool
(15 miles south-west), Ross-on-Wye (10 miles further north) and,
from 1883, the town of Coleford, 5 miles to the east in the Forest
of Dean.
Ultimately it lost large
sums of money and closed to passengers in 1959. Freight followed
in 1964. The continued occasional use of a miniature gauge railway
at Tintern station means that the line has not quite been abandoned
by rail transport but all the sections still carrying track are
currently being proposed for conversion to a new cycleway.
Rail travel offers an
unusually intimate way of viewing the landscape. Maybe it's the
way in which the railway sweeps across the land, variously viewing
it from above, below or occasionally the level that the land
is actually at. Maybe it's the fact that railways tend to be
quite narrow when trundling through rural landscapes. Maybe it's
just the way that the trees brush against the windows when Network
Rail forgets to prune them back to the viaduct's parapet walls.
This intimacy was readily
available on the Wye Valley Railway. It climbed away from the
mainline just east of Chepstow and turned north on a high embankment,
which carried it across fields and through Tidenham station into
a cutting. This cutting carried it through more fields and Netherhope
Halt before the railway plunged into Tidenham Tunnel. After a
minute or so of pitchy blackness trains emerged into the peace
and solitude of the Lower Wye Valley, clattering along the hillside
below Offa's Dyke and vanishing into Tintern Tunnel just as they
approached Tintern and its Abbey. Beyond the tunnel, the railway
crossed to the west bank of the Wye, passed through Tintern station,
descended to river level, ran under Brockweir bridge and paused
briefly at Brockweir Halt.
North of Brockweir was
a tamer landscape of fields, with woods only on the steeper slopes.
The railway ran along the river bank, hemmed in by steep hills,
past Llandogo Halt and the adjacent Llandogo Church, to the sylvan
settings of St Briavels station next to Bigsweir Bridge. More
fields bounded the railway as it ran up to Whitebrook, but the
east bank of the river was now covered in trees and trains entered
a similar forest once through Whitebrook Halt. Nearly two miles
of stationless track followed before Redbrook came into view;
the line passed through Penallt Halt, crossed back to the east
bank of the Wye and ran through Redbrook station in quick succession.
More woodland followed, although green fields climbed up the
hills on the west bank to the hamlet of Penallt. Eventually the
landscape opened out and the railway passed over Wyesham Junction
(for Coleford), swept through Wyesham Halt and past the suburb
of the same name and descended across the Wye on a vast stone
viaduct, with the line to Ross on an embankment on the right,
into station of Monmouth Troy. |
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In
Development
This varied line was
inaugurated by an Act of Parliament in 1866 at the end of the
Second Railway Mania (the first occurred in the 1840s). It was
to be the third railway to reach Monmouth. The first arrived
from the west from Pontypool in 1857 after a difficult construction
including a collapsing tunnel by the intermediate station of
Usk. This line, the Coleford, Monmouth, Usk and Pontypool Railway,
was sufficiently bankrupted after building its main Monmouth
station that it never bothered to extend over the older Monmouth
Tramroad to Coleford, making do with building a large viaduct
across the Wye to Wyesham in 1862 to provide a link with the
tramroad.
Shortly afterwards, the
Ross and Monmouth Railway was approved by an 1865 Act of Parliament
and began work to reach Monmouth from the north. This work included
uncooperative scenery, which collapsed across the line at every
possible opportunity, and an economic collapse which left the
railway unable to reach older station at Monmouth. Instead it
built its own station at May Hill, which was convenient for the
very bottom end of the Monmouth Tramroad and Monmouth itself
but not for its fellow railway. An extension in 1874 connected
it in to the Coleford, Monmouth, Usk and Pontypool Railway and
their station, now suffixed "Troy".
The Wye Valley Railway's
Act was passed only a year after that of the Ross and Monmouth
Railway but the economic collapse delayed work on the line, which
was to be built from Wyesham Junction to Wye Valley Junction
for single track. There were initial worries that the line would
be built to broad gauge (7ft) but this opposition to the line
was withdrawn when it was confirmed that standard gauge (4ft
8 ½ inches) would be used. One passing loop would be installed
at Tintern, but trains would be able to pass at Wye Valley Junction
and Wyesham as well, and freight trains could be held, if necessary,
in loops at Tidenham, Bigsweir, and Redbrook.
The northern part of
this initial scheme was largely similar to that which was built,
although the landscape through which it was to run was somewhat
different - for example, in order for the railway to pass the
now remote village of Whitebrook it was going to have to pass
close to and possibly demolish a warehouse. Whitebrook had a
quay for the loading of the paper traffic into river-going vessels
at the time, of which no trace now remains and both warehouses
are long gone. South of Llandogo there were also to be substantial
variations to the route. Rather than follow the east bank of
the river to Brockweir, the line was to climb sharply up the
hillside and cross over the turnpike road which is now the A466.
It would then run around the hillside above Tintern, crossing
the side valleys on embankments and giving excellent views down
on the Abbey. Then trains were to proceed gently down the hillside,
around the inside of a meander since quarried away, over the
river on a fine bridge and into a steeply-climbing 282 yard tunnel
through another meander. A hundred yards or so in the open, near
the bottom of Wintour's Leap (a rather fine cliff overlooking
the Wye north of Chepstow), would be followed by a second tunnel,
712 yards long, carrying the line inland towards Tidenham. It
could then swing round and descend to join the mainline, with
the proposed junction pointing west at the eastern end of the
mainline's bridge over the Wye. A chord would provide an eastbound
link to the mainline, although it appears to have targeted a
hypothetical alternative route rather than the railway which
had actually been built.
The line would be operated
by the Great Western Railway (paying 50% of income to the WVR).
Care was to be taken to ensure that there would be no damage
done to Tintern Abbey or the surrounding grounds.
The Bill received its
second reading on Tuesday, 27th of February 1866 and reported
on page 6 of The Times the next day. It then was passed
on its third reading on Monday July 23rd 1866 and reported in
The Times the following day again, although this time
on page 5. On Monday May 11th The Times reported, now
on page 4, that the shares were being issued to raise capital,
and that "It will further open up a new and much shorter
route from Liverpool and the North, Birmingham and the Midland
districts, to Newport, Cardiff, Bristol and the West of England,
and this through route will be very materially improved by the
completion of the Severn Tunnel now in the course of construction
... The railway will command a very large traffic to and from
the Forest of Dean and the ports of Newport and Cardiff, as well
as a considerable through traffic of passsengers and goods between
the districts of England and Wales north and south of the line.
... A very great traffic is anticipated from tourists visiting
Tintern Abbey and the far-famed valley of the Wye, and also both
in goods and passengers from the resident population as well
as from the quarries [near Tintern], wireworks [Tintern], papermills
[Whitebrook], tinplate works [Redbrook], foundries [Tintern and
Redbrook], and other manufactories" which mostly shows that,
despite vast increases in speed, single track branch lines do
not carry nearly as much as they used to. In fact, only the local
traffic was to prosper with some tourists in summer.
The full prospectus was
even better, featuring as it did a carefully drawn Map. This
Map was drawn almost to scale but with some slight liberties
around the alignment of certain junctions. The idea of a mainline
between Newport and Gloucester is no problem, since that was
then part of the mainline from South Wales to London. The idea
of a mainline from Merthyr Tydfil to Worcester is a little more
misplaced, given that there was a way of doing that journey but
about half of it was on steeply-graded and/or single track lines;
such a journey required two changes. The WVR was to form part
of a line which would link the two - the rest would be provided
by the Ross and Monmouth Railway and a proposed line from Ross-on-Wye
to the little village of Dymock and from thence to join the line
linking Merthyr and Worcester at the market town of Ledbury.
The Map also introduces the curious claim that the South Wales
Railway terminated on the eastern side of Cardiff and inferred
that at least as much traffic went from Pontypool to Hereford
via Monmouth (single track with passing places) as via the still-open
line through Abergavenny (double track throughout). There was
a prediction that "lime and limestone will form a satisfactory
feature in the traffic returns" - a point on which British
Rail agreed with them for a change, although not enough to retain
the entire line. A minimum return of 6% per annum was promised
with total gross traffic per annum raising £36,779 (a remarkably
precise figure, given how incorrect it was. One wonders where
they got it from).
So much for the prospectus,
which was mostly wrong - there was no through traffic, there
are few records of intensive paper traffic (not aided by the
Whitebrook paperworks having to use St Briavels, a mile away,
as their railhead) and only one dividend is recorded as having
been paid - that was before the railway opened and no dividend
was paid afterwards, let alone 6% (which was being paid at this
time by the very profitable South Welsh Rhymney Railway, which
was short, double track, lacking in major structures, and carrying
intensive coal traffic). There are lies, damned lies, statistics
and then there are railway prospectuses, to add to a famous quote
from then Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The shares were sold
for £20 each, in batches of 5, so £100 per batch;
by 1904 the report to the shareholders revealed that this had
fallen to £12 10s 0d for the £100 of shares, or £2
10s 0d per share. The shareholders lost 87.5% of their original
investment, yet this was what the prospectus called "An
English investment of unusually satisfactory character"
which generates the question of what an English investment of
unsatisfactory character did with your money. Burying it tends
to obtain a better return. Perhaps they were thinking of the
neighbouring Forest of Dean Central Railway, which had been started
in 1861 and had already spent all its funds for the entire 6½
mile line on building about three miles of route in twice the
time that had been predicted for building the complete line.
At least the WVR was eventually completed without going too seriously
bankrupt; however, if you ever find yourself in the Public Record
Office at Kew or the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth,
do not forget to read the Wye Valley Railway Prospectus. It is
a marvellous piece of comic literature. The sad thing is that
there were plenty more like it; we forget many of them because
the lines which they dealt with (like Ross on Wye to Dymock)
were never built.
One reason for many of
them not being built was a major economic collapse in mid-1866.
It originated with the Norwich merchant bank, Overend and Gurney,
which had grown enough to expand into the London market, become
Britain's second biggest bank after the Bank of England and lend
large sums of money to various enterprises such as a Greek shipping
line, some East London engineering firms and a scheme to turn
Galway into a major transatlantic port. When these enterprises
failed the losses were too big to acknowledge and so were allowed
to remain on the books, ostensibly being charged interest and
causing the company some considerable concern. In 1865 it floated
on the stock market with suitably discounted shares and hoped
thereby to raise enough capital to keep it afloat.
The demise in January
1866 of an engineering firm with "Overend" in its name
caused a brief wobble but once it was realised that there was
no connection Overend and Gurney returned to sailing a steady
passage through the choppy waters of high finance, carefully
ensuring that its shareholders never got concerned enough to
look at the books and find out what exactly was hiding behind
the instution's good name. Such concern was raised when a couple
of months later the bank attempted to sue the Mid-Wales Railway
- owners of a very impressive but not exceptionally profitable
line running up the higher reaches of the Wye Valley between
Brecon and Llandiloes via Builth Wells - for an insignificant
debt which it officially could afford to lose but everyone knew
the Mid-Wales couldn't afford to pay. The claim failed on a technicality;
the question was raised as to how many other Overend and Gurney
loans couldn't be reclaimed due to technicalities (and, indeed,
how many Overend and Gurney loans were owed by basket cases like
the Mid-Wales) and within a very short order Overend and Gurney
sank beneath the waves, turning the once impressive claim of
being "rich as the Gurneys" into something of a non-achievement.
The original Norwich branch survived the ensuing turmoil and
became a founding partner in the Barclays Bank at the end of
the 19th century.
Despite the Bank of England
following the demise of Overend and Gurney with the sort of quantitative
easing not seen again until after the next run on a bank (when
Northern Rock went down), the crash brought the Second Railway
Mania to an abrupt halt, leaving Britain struggling through a
few years of financial depression, not aided by the ongoing Crimean
War. It also saw the construction of the Wye Valley line held
off for a few years but work eventually started in 1874. On the
17th of July 1874 the Railway was registered with the list of
Joint Stock Companies; the secretary was Edward Mardon. Presumably
sometime between then and Saturday,October 3rd 1874, when The
Times repeated the prospectus, construction work finally
began. |
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Construction
and Operation 1876-1880
The most notable result
of the delay in beginning construction was that the opportunity
was taken to re-route the line. It would now pass clear of the
warehouse at Whitebrook and avoid the twisting route through
Tintern. Instead the more familiar riverbank alignment was chosen
between Llandogo and Brockweir; the line then rose through Tintern
station, crossed the river, passed through a short tunnel and
ran along the hillside for a couple of miles, before plunging
into a 995 yard tunnel to emerge near Netherhope Lane, from where
it would run south to join the mainline about quarter of a mile
east of its Wye bridge.
The Times handily details most of the General
Meetings, while the Register of Joint Stock Companies took in
accounts - theoretically every six months, although being the
WVR they were in fact rather less regular - which means that
it is possible to get a good impression of how things progressed
through the Company's independent career. This latter shows that
by the 19th of June 1875 the Company had issued all its stock
and collected half the proceeds, so was going to attempt to raise
more money. A half-yearly General Meeting was held on Friday
20th August 1875 when a vote of confidence was passed in favour
of Mr William Hawes, the Chairman of the Board of Directors,
by the shareholders - little did the poor people know what was
coming to them. At this point construction was proceeding according
to plan, but stations would have to be enlarged as they were
for passengers only and not suitable for the projected goods
traffic (which had been planned to travel over the line nine
years prevoiusly but evidently no plans had been made to actually
accommodate it). The line was £64,115 in pocket - riches
which would never be achieved again. A few sidings would have
to be laid to benefit the railway - probably mostly in goods
yards - but one was of particular interest, partly for the great
difficulty which it gave its bigger sister, and it would be difficult
to say that it was ever of benefit to the railway - and, as the
companies which used this long siding of about half a mile in
length all went bankrupt, it can not exactly be said to have
benefitted them either.
The proposed alterations
to the route shortly before construction began resulted in complaints
being made by the owners of Tintern Wireworks and the people
of Tintern that the line was due to bypass their village. The
result was that the new scheme made provision for a highly expensive
branch line to placate those protesters who offered profitable
traffic. The Tintern (or Wireworks) branch would run from Tintern
(or Wireworks) junction to the Wireworks in the valley above
Tintern. A viaduct had to be installed over the river with sufficent
space for vessels to pass under at high water. £500 (then)
had to be paid for each tree taken out to make way for the railway.
To top it all, the WVR was not allowed to charge for use of the
branch (except for use of a now demolished weighbridge) but the
railway company did have to supply all stock to run the branch
and keep it in a good condition. There was still annoyance, as
the line was to be for freight only and the locals would still
have to use the official station, about a mile away.
The Wireworks branch
was completed in August 1875 to a proud announcement from the
engineers that it was now ready to commence operations. This
was just a tad optimistic to say the least, as the main WVR was
not to be completed for another thirteen months.
September 1875 saw the
Registar of Joint Stock Companies receive accounts showing that
the Railway had taken out £76,600 in debentures. Debenture
creditors have a little bit of paper called a debenture which
says that in the event of the company going bankrupt they get
paid before anyone else (including those poor shareholders, who
come at the bottom of a very long list including various people
who might appear to have no claim to any money from the sale
of assets) and such people were probably popular following the
1866 financial crisis, being safer than banks, and useful for
borrowing money from for a short time - basically, they were
just a smaller version of a bank. Being a debenture creditor
isn't much different from being a shareholder, except that it's
much safer - interest is paid regularly and you are going to
get your money back whatever, although this is balanced by not
getting voting rights in general meetings - and this breed is
likely to have been taken on in about 1874 to pay for the Wireworks
Branch. They would cause trouble later, but just for now the
Railway was looking forward to a period of comparative financial
peace and quiet.
On Thursday November
18th 1875 the WVR was given another hurdle to cross - which hit
the weather column of The Times - when a landslide near
Redbrook blocked the nearly finished line. This was lighter than
the finished Ross and Monmouth railway to the north got however,
as there part of the embankment was removed by the Wye south
of Symonds Yat - fortunately the next train stopped before following
the removed embankment down the Wye to Chepstow.
Upon opening of the WVR
on the 1st of November 1876, a train loaded with delegates went
from Chepstow to Monmouth and back, stopping off at Tintern for
lunch with the Duke of Beaufort on the outward journey. The return
journey took place in the evening and from Tintern to Tidenham
Tunnel (the Shorn Cliff section) the rocky hillside alongside
the railway was lit by flashing lights. Mysteriously the completed
Tidenham Tunnel was some 185 yards longer than proposed and therefore
qualified for inclusion among the ranks of GWR-worked tunnels
which were over 1,000 yards long. (There would ultimately be
29 such tunnels, though Tidenham was the only one on the Monmouth
rail network.) The Wireworks branch was opened shortly afterwards
to an opening ceremony that was "a little deflated"
(Brian Handley) owing to the owners of the Wireworks having gone
out of business.
The Wireworks was eventually
reopened and two locomotives were acquired from the Taff Vale
Railway (between Cardiff and Merthyr) in the form of Nos 33 and
34. One was used to assist with spare parts to keep the other
running. The complete locomotive was named "Tintern".
Later locos came in the form of a small vertical-boilered loco
nicknamed "Coffee Pot" owing to the shape of the boiler,
and a group of horses which worked along the trackbed to a local
sawmill after the Wireworks closed for good.
The original timetable
was a basic affair set up to allow the railway to be worked by
one passenger train shuttling between Chepstow and Monmouth Troy,
offering four trains each way each day. The first train arrived
in Monmouth at 09:23, having left Chepstow at 08:30 and made
four intermediate stops at Tidenham, Tintern, St Briavels (then
Bigsweir) and Redbrook. The last train from Troy was at 19:10
and returned to Chepstow at 20:03, giving a journey time of 53
minutes for a 14½ mile journey. It appears that a bay
was eventually provided at Chepstow, then on the mainline from
London to South Wales, for Wye Valley trains, although they shared
platform space at Monmouth with the more established railways
from Pontypool and Ross. The initial timetable also omitted the
stop at Bigsweir on the second train of the day from Monmouth;
it is not clear why. By 1884 services had been extended five
miles south to Portskewett. In those days a ferry ran across
the Severn from Portskewett to Pilning; it was met by a number
of express trains and offered a faster, if rougher, way to get
from London to South Wales than going via Gloucester. It was
reasonable that the WVR should link into this. Following the
opening of the Severn Tunnel in 1886, the WVR's services - still
four trains each way each day - were extended to meet express
trains from London coming through the new tunnel at Severn Tunnel
Junction, which added a further 2¾ miles to the journey.
The WVR's bay platform at Severn Tunnel Junction is still clearly
visible today at the eastern end of the central island platform,
with edging slabs still in place and the buffer stop - a lump
of concrete at the back of the bay with rails nailed to it -
still intact; it is now a popular sitting place at the base of
the footbridge. The track and signalling, however, is long gone.
Nowadays the locations
of the stations seem to be almost singularly useless, with only
Redbrook being conveniently situated for the place that it was
meant to serve. Various points should be noted in relation to
this. Firstly, railway stations are always more use when they
are on the railway. The railway had to follow a route which through
trains could use with some degree of ease and the stations then
had to be arranged along it as best as they could be. It could
have been laid out as a local line instead, going through Tintern
as originally proposed, but that would have resulted in a slow,
steep and twisting line that would have closed with other such
slow, steep and twisting lines in the 1930s. The original formation
through Tintern was not conducive to through traffic and wouldn't
have left enough room for a decent station on the steep hillside.
Secondly, the line was built in an era when people were still
used to walking everywhere. If you lived in St Briavels and wanted
to go to Lydney, Coleford or the river, then you would walk.
Therefore having to walk to the station was not as much of an
issue as it is now, when railway stations have to compete with
a car parked neatly 10 feet from the door and capable of getting
within a few hundred yards of the ultimate destination. If you
weren't the sort who would walk then you would have a horse to
hand and you would be grateful that the railway would reduce
the distance that you were about to have to spend on the back
of the thing or in the coach that it was pulling over the usually
bumpy roads. Thirdly, the four stations were arranged in a manner
which was jolly useful operationally. They were each about ten
minutes apart, allowing a theoretical capacity of three trains
each way each hour. Tidenham was located where heavier goods
trains would have to stop anyway to "pin down brakes"
for the descent to Chepstow; Tintern was roughly halfway between
Portskewett and Monmouth (slightly favouring Portskewett, so
when everything was stretched to Severn Tunnel Junction it was
still roughly halfway; possibly this was planned in so far as
you can plan the pre-set geography of a valley); St Briavels
was at a road junction and no doubt it was believed that this
would pick up more traffic. Putting an additional station at
Llandogo might have been far more convenient for Llandogo but
would also have disrupted the vast quantities of through traffic
which the WVR promoters really believed would use their railway.
Following completion
of the Wye Valley line proposals for a line to the village of
Pontrilas, several miles to the north-west and on the busy Abergavenny
to Hereford route, began to slowly solidify into a company promoting
an actual railway, which then ultimately disappeared again. It
was not a new scheme; in the 1860s plans had been drawn up, shares
sold and a contracter engaged to construct a broadly similar
route. This was not "an English investment of unusually
satisfactory character" since the original Monnow Valley
Railway Company was saved from bankruptcy by the collapse of
the contracter, Thomas Savin, after he had bored ten yards of
tunnel at Monmouth Troy station. The tunnel ultimately formed
a useful storage facility for the station and now makes an interesting
talking point for the owner of the house which has the complete
works of the Monnow Valley Railway in its back garden. Had the
tunnel actually been completed, it would now have been sliced
into bits by the dual tunnels of a new road passing through the
same hill at right-angles to the line to Pontrilas.
In 1877 The Times
for Saturday August 25th reported the receipts on page 7, which
were quite good, offering a profit of £26,955, resulting
in a decision to begin developing the wharves at Chepstow "moderately
and in conjunction with the Great Western Railway". In the
meantime, "as regarded the main line and stations, the works
were practically finished, and before their next half-yearly
meeting they believed that the construction and maintenance would
be completed." We may hope that two things inferred here
were not actually the case - the line should have been finished
(it had been open for nine - nearly ten - months by this point)
and maintenance should have continued to be carried out after
completion. However, the fact that debates continued over several
bits of construction work (a bridge at Bishton, between Tidenham
and Netherhope, and turntables at Monmouth and Chepstow - see here) and the line's infrastructure
was not noted for its reliability all suggest that in fact the
works were not finished and, once they were, the WVR ceased to
carry out proper maintenance works.
There had also been an
Act put before Parliament in 1876 for more sidings at Chepstow
and Redbrook and a road bridge at Brockweir, together with the
near-mythical third side of the Monmouth Triangle, none of which
the WVR ever built but which were presumably part of these planned
developments. (The sidings at Chepstow and the road bridge at
Brockweir were built by other parties; the sidings at Redbrook
were quietly forgotten and the old tramways continued to be used;
the third side of the Monmouth Triangle is near-mythical since
everyone offered to built it but the half-mile long chord between
Wyesham and Monmouth May Hill which could have saved Monmouth's
rail link - perhaps - was lost with the demise of the Monmouth
Tramroad and has now completely disappeared.) It was agreed that
the Great Western made a good operating company and that traffic
was improving, the decision was taken to change the dates of
future meetings (to March and September rather than February
and August) and the meeting closed.
Meanwhile in May 1878
the Railway reported to the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies
that it wanted to borrow another £17,400 in debentures.
There are two things notable about this. One is that it shows
that the Railway was making a quite impressive operating loss,
since it was having to borrow large sums of money at a time when
it had fairly minimal costs (the GWR paid operating fees and
it had finished most of the construction work, barring the turntable
at Monmouth, which was never built anyway). The other is that
this bit of paperwork was some five months late. The WVR never
was good at punctuality.
Monday June 28th 1880
(page 16) saw The Times print proof that there were
paper mills at Whitebrook - the Fernside Paper Mills were advertised
as being up for sale, with a supply of water that was "constant
and pure", along with 12 acres of land. The Wye Valley Railway
was available to provide transport of raw materials and manufactured
goods, it was added. This would have generated 14 tons of traffic
per week for the railway - good backup business, albeit only
about two wagonloads per week, but there are no records of the
WVR getting in on it - however, as the mill was up for sale again
two years later it probably didn't sell this time round. |
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Operation
1880-1905
On the 18th of October
1879 paperwork had arrived with the Registrar of Joint Stock
Companies to say that the Railway had changed its designated
signatory to their new Secretary, Mr George Sneath; the Company
was now chaired by Mr Charles Cotton Ferard. This was presumably
directly connected to the Railway's appearance on Thursday October
28th 1880 in a section of the classified advertising on page
14 of The Times which mentions the Railway in connection
with Edwin Waterhouse, a London receiver. Apparently, the WVR,
of Act passed in 1866 and Amendment Acts passed in 1871, 1875
and 1876 had spent its money and whatever profits it had actually
made and now was having problems with its debenture creditors.
A George Frederick Hinsbelwood had pulled the plug and 17 days
short of the fourth anniversary of opening the WVR had entered
receivership, on October 14th 1880. The case, after beginning
in September 1879 (when presumably Hinsbelwood's interest had
taken too long to get too him as it evidently hadn't been sent)
had claimed the original board within a month but only properly
got going twelve months later and had taken about a month to
get through to appointing a receiver. A request had gone out
for all debenture creditors to appear and prove that they were
debenture creditors so that they could get their money.
All in all, 1880 was
not a particularly good year for the railway, particularly as
it also suffered its first notable rail accident. A picture at
The
Railway Archive
(an external link) looks like the south end of Wyesham Junction.
A rather large tank engine flipped over. It had been climbing
out of Monmouth at about 8mph when it collided with a rock which
had fallen from the hillside above onto the railway in the previous
half-hour or so. The weather had been cold and wet recently and
the maintenance gang had been removing rocks which looked likely
to fall, but this one wasn't expected to do so. The driver survived
being doused with the contents of the firebox and the water from
the boiler; the fireman was thrown down the hillside onto the
muddy (but probably frozen) road. The front three wagons of the
nine in the train were derailed. The train was the 1pm goods
train departure from Troy to Chepstow, which had left at about
1.19pm. Aside from the fact that the tank engine is upside down
the picture is interesting for showing what was typical motive
power for the time, along with some WVR fencing and track as
they were in the late 19th century. The report, which is bundled
with all other 1880 rail accident reports at the National Archive,
has no accompanying photo but makes interesting reading for working
practices and attitudes of the time.
By March 25th 1881 The
Times reported on page 4 that a case started at the same
time as Hinsbelwood's, probably also on debenture payments, by
a Thomas Buckmaster was still running, but being a railway company
in court was obviously the done thing, as someone called Easterbrook
had the Midland Railway Company in court later in the day over
something - and the Midland owned most of the railways in the
industrial Midlands of England.
The appointment of Ferard
and Sneath marks the end of the terms of the original Board of
Directors of the Wye Valley Railway and another five were engaged
to replace them. These included a local vicar, possibly with
hopes that he would encourage God to look down on them more kindly.
It must be remembered that the Wye Valley has, for several hundred
years, been a local centre of religion.
A few weeks later the
WVR was still busy getting its publicity in The Times
law notices, now against a person called Hawes, and as only one
Hawes is known to have been involved in the WVR's affairs it
is presumably the first Chairman of the Board of Directors, referred
to on Thursday April 28th 1881, page 4. However, the law notice
gets no more specific on whom the case involves, but the full
law reports of the time state that it concerned a dubious divident
payment to shareholders (see
here). The following
day the case was still going, now in the High Court of Justice
rather than the Chancery Division.
Although the report to
the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies in January 1880 had included
the decision to go for £34,800 rather than £17,400
in the latest round of debenture-based fund-raising, it was also
mentioned that they had only been able to obtain £11,400,
taking total debt to £88,000. It is quite remarkable that
they got anything at all, given that the Company can hardly have
had a workable credit rating (until you compare it with the Forest
of Dean Central Railway, which had closed the top 2½ miles
of its line eight years previously and was running three trains
per week over the remainder, at which point the WVR indeed looks
like "an English investment of unusually satisfactory character",
since the line was at least still open throughout, even if it
was broke). This meant that the company headed into 1881 looking
for another £23,400; the only point of relief was that
the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies had started using a rather
fetching red ink on the stamp which he stamped their paperwork
with.
By 1882 a page 16 advertisment
had come up in the Saturday July 1st issue of The Times,
with the Clearwater Mill, "about a mile and a half from
Bigsweir station" up for auction. As there is no reference
to a private siding anywhere closer presumably the mills were
finding transport a bit annoying. This time, 34 acres were up
for sale, but there is no reference to production, although the
water power was "valuable" (the motor from the waterwheel
generated 75 horsepower).
By June 9th 1882 The
Times had an advert up for the sale of the Fernside Paper
Mills at Whitebrook again, still on 14 tons of paper a week.
Evidently the last 2 years had seen few improvements.
In 1883 things changed
a bit (though there is no evidence of increases in profit) when
Coleford and Monmouth were linked by a railway, as opposed to
the tramway which had been in use since 1806. The Coleford Branch
opened on December 1st with a short, uncomfortable but regular
journey ahead of it (like the WVR, it made little profit); a
journey which would see it transporting passengers and goods
until the darkest days of the First World War shortly after the
Somme. Its life was not aided by the fact that it was practically
a branch from Monmouth to Coleford, not a through route to the
Forest of Dean and the industries within - the link to the main
Forest of Dean network was made with several reversals in restricted
space at Coleford - not that the shortage of space was a problem,
as both lines from Coleford were steeply graded and trains will
never have been long anyway.
Friday, September 25th,
1885 (page 11), saw The Times report on the half-year
general meeting, which had occured the previous day. The chairman
was Mr. C. C. Ferard. The railway had made some profits, at £1,347,
but the debenture creditors were still lurking behind the new
company as the Great Western was going to have to put a further
£567 on top to pay interest (debenture debt was running
at £88,000 at this point, and had been for some time).
The Severn Tunnel was nearly complete (at last) and shares had
been sold to people apparently on the grounds that this would
benefit the railway and share values would shoot up - however,
such hopes were dashed by Ferard, who commented that this was
a statement "which no-one who had taken any part in the
working of the company would be justified in making". Apparently
the Great Western was expected to do something sooner or later
about taking over the company for a reasonable sum but there
was felt to be a need to have enough money to fight the larger
company if efforts were made to force a purchase through Parliament
for a sum which the WVR felt was "unsatisfactory".
The action against "William Hawes and others" had apparently
been profitable at £5,700 being taken, showing that you
cannot easily get away with leading innocent shareholders into
receivership, and this meant that, along with selling general
assets in June for £7,400, the company could also feel
proud that it knew it had a good future income from action against
Messrs. Reed for £2000, and a further £3000 from
Baron Grant (sadly not to be as profitable as first thought).
It appears that the railway was, by this point, making most of
its money from legal cases. Presumably these unfortunates had
ommitted to pay their bills at some point.
Twelve months later,
Ferard was being pessimistic for the half-annual general meeting,
which was reported on page 11 of The Times on Wednesday
September 29 1886. September 1st had seen the Severn Tunnel open
to goods and mineral traffic, but not passengers as yet, and
there was no expectation of massive increase in profit for the
WVR. He was still hoping that the WVR would be bought out be
the Great Western, on the grounds that both would benefit, but
understood that the outlay on the tunnel meant that the Great
Western were tempted to "hang back a little at present".
The remainder of the report, though, would not encourage anyone
to buy out the route - traffic was falling away and business
in the valley was poor. The paperwork for the Registrar of Joint
Stock Companies two months later was more optimistic, as the
railway had reduced its debenture debt to £76,600; it is
not clear how.
On March 18th 1887 The
Times published what appeared to be a "sneak preview"
of the report for the ordinary general meeting, which was not
due for 8 days. There is some reference to action being taken
against "the two parties who are now in default" but
no mention as to who they were; maybe it was Messrs. Reed and
Baron Grant, since they are mentioned again in the next report.
The Severn Tunnel had finally opened to passengers on December
1st, but this had not saved WVR profits for 1886 being down £337
from 1885 - the report blaming this partly on the Great Western
reducing the amount of line which earned the WVR money (possibly
by cutting it back to Wye Valley Junction - Wyesham Junction
from Chepstow - Monmouth Troy). £24 had come from other
sources and interest ran to £1,914, of which £507
was being paid by the GWR. The twice-yearly paperwork for the
Registrar of Joint Stock Companies was entered (late, as usual)
that August with the normal £76,600 of debenture debt.
By the next meeting six
months later it was two years since the previous problems with
Messrs. Reed and Baron Grant, and neither had paid up. Page 9
of The Times for Friday September 23rd 1887 revealed
that some minor benefits might be coming from the Severn Tunnel,
but it had been decided that using the route as a through line
was not an option as the gradients were steep. Not mentioned
is the fact that traffic from Bristol would have to have the
engine run around at Severn Tunnel Junction before proceeding
to Monmouth Troy, where it would have to run around again in
a short platform, and then go onto Ross-on-Wye, where it would
join the line to Hereford - and only at Hereford would the train
return to a double track railway which could cope with intensive
traffic (about four to five hours later). Despite intense efforts
and increasing profits, the attempt to sell up to the Great Western
could not be described as going well. By this stage the Duke
of Beaufort, formerly a good friend of the WVR, wanted money
out of it, a Mr Gumbley was grumbling about how badly the Great
Western was working the line (ten years previously it was being
done well, according to the WVR) and Mr. A. B. Joyner had replaced
Ferard as chairman of the board, although the exact date of this
change is unclear.
What with expensive earthworks
to keep up and the fact that this is Britain and it rains a lot,
putting off tourists, the line continued to make a loss. The
first offer to buy out the line was finally, after much courtship
by the WVR, made by the GWR in the late 1880s.
On Monday May 6th 1889
The Times reported on a meeting which had been held
the previous day, and was called to announce the Great Western's
offer to buy the line, which Joyner reccommended accepting, adding
that all the directors were planning to resign anyway. Not much
time was given - a decision had to be made that day. Apparently
Mr R. A. Read junior, also on the Board, had also sent a circular
around, this one offering to buy shares for more than the Great
Western, at £1. 3s. 0d each. After being questioned who
his backers were and what he was up to (questions which Read
declined to answer) the matter was discussed and put to the vote,
with a three-quarters majority needed to authorise sale. Six
shareholders authorised sale - the other seven voted for Read
to be allowed to take the company if the shares were to be sold.
Then a poll was taken based on how much of a share in the company
each shareholder had, with £88,570 going towards the sale
to the Great Western, and £45,770 vetoing the idea (total
share value rated at £134,340). To sell the line, £100,755
worth of shares were needed to say that the line should be sold
- the Great Western, after all the WVR's courtship, must have
been very surprised at the announcement that there would be no
sale after all. Despite Read's efforts to keep the company going
though, the other directors did not remain for long, resigning
as promised, although the company was to last a further 15 years.
The Registrar of Joint
Stock Companies was instead informed on the 17th of October 1889
that the Secretary was now Edward Bruce Read; Robert Arthur Read
was the second of the two signatories from the Board, with the
other being William Edward Whadeoat, the new Chairman. Edward
Bruce Read did not believe in hurrying his work, it seems, as
the next few sets of returns were consistently late, with those
for the second half of 1889 and the first half of 1890 being
despatched in the wrong order. In August 1891 the Registrar decided
to delicately point out that the Railway's returns for the first
half of 1891 were late and threaten fines. This note was repeated
for the second half of 1891, but neither set of returns appeared.
Instead on Friday July 29th 1892 the WVR was back in the Law
Notices of The Times, being prosecuted by someone named
Cook. The next report, on Tuesday August 9th 1892, announced
a change of judge from an Order of the Court. No further details
have emerged.
This may, however, have
had something to do with the Registrar being informed on the
13th of August that the Railway had a new Secretary (a Robert
Ullmer), which was soon followed by the emergence of the paperwork
for 1891. It stated nothing new - the railway still owed £76,600
to debenture holders. Punctuality of the paperwork then slowly
improved. R.A. Read was replaced with another Whadeoat in March
1896. The Railway was still struggling on independently and even
managed to settle an informal agreement with the Registrar of
Joint Stock Companies, it seems, that paperwork would be sent
in batches up to two years late, since nothing was changing.
In 1900 the Company found a typewriter to type the covering note
to the Registrar, but the note was typed on notepaper with the
first two digits of the year already in place - "18".
The typewriter had vanished by 1902, but the 19th century notepaper
remained. It was replaced with some new notepaper for the final
set of paperwork, which arrived in October 1904 and covered the
second half of 1902, all of 1903 and the first half of 1904.
Debentures remained firmly at £76,600. Had the Company
survived, it would probably have delivered the next set in October
1906. |
|
Great
Western Ownership
In December 1904 another
offer was made by the GWR to buy out the railway, which was accepted
unanimously by the shareholders. They got 12.5% of their investment
back, which is probably far more than they were expecting, and
on 1st July 1905 the Wye Valley Railway Company ceased to exist.
The final two returns to the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies
were not packaged up with the other WVR documentation and, if
they were ever produced, are presumably in with the GWR's papers
somewhere. It is unlikely that they say anything new, although
it would be interesting to know how much of the £76,600
the debenture holders got back (probably 12.5%, or £9,575,
which would again be more than they were expecting, even for
"An English investment of an unusually satisfactory character").
Backlogged maintenance which hadn't been done was completed and
the service was improved from three to the original four trains
each way each day.
Much of the WVR's history
consists of problems surrounding the Company, rather than operations
of the actual Railway, which ran fairly reliably and with minimal
incident. Once it was absorbed into the main Great Western network
it was inevitably going to have a much quieter time, due to the
fact that it could blend into the background with its losses
(which continued for the rest of its career) being underwritten
by the Great Western and its attempts to provide a service to
support rural communities. This social service could not justify
major investment based soley on its financial returns and so
could only continue for as long as local residents continued
to support its inadequate operation on a daily basis. Once they
ceased to do so, it would be lucky to cling on until the next
big maintenance bill loomed. There was no alternative transport
in the Wye Valley in 1905 - the old turnpike road was inadequate
and the river-going ships had long since abandoned the valley
- so there was no immediate threat to the line's future at this
stage.
In 1907 the WVR was mentioned
in passing in The Times with a lengthy article on Monday,
November 11th (page 3) when a ferry owner who operated a ferry,
charging 1d per person for a service which had been provided
"since time immemorial" across the Wye at Brockweir
took some local landowners to court because they built a bridge
across the Wye and the railway, which might flood his house and
ruin his business. It was ruled that having the ferry did not
mean that someone else could not open up in competition, in this
case by building a bridge, and that it had been agreed by large
numbers of people (including the Board of Trade) that his house
would not be flooded by the bridge, so his case was thrown out.
This case, after investigation by this website, gained its own
page - see
here.
While the Great Western
attempted to improve the service, it still wasn't brilliant,
remaining firmly at four trains each way each day and operating
with the same old locos and stock. Flora Klickmann, then editor
of various London magazines, commented in The Flower Patch
Among the Hills (based in the First World War), that "Everybody
that is going away scrambles into the train with precipitate
haste, as though they were trying to catch a train on the tube
or a sprinting motorbus in the Strand! although they know quite
well that the peaceful old engine - already twenty-five minutes
behind time - won't think of stirring again until it has had
a ten minutes nap!" Such reliability was typical of branch
lines, which today are looked back on with such fondness.
The First World War also
saw a few changes in the area. Another branch line opened up
at Chepstow to serve the Government's No. 2 Shipyards - the Sedbury
branch opened in 1918 and closed in 1920, although it briefly
provided a second junction a little to the east of the WVR's.
Chepstow became host to the No. 1 Shipyards, which appears to
have eradicated the final traces of Chepstow's short-lived turntable
in the process. The Monmouth rail network lost four members of
staff to the German guns - Tintern was worst hit, with Mr W.
Reynolds (of the Traffic department) and Mr V. Butler (track
maintenance) both being killed in fighting. Monmouth Troy lost
Mr W. Jones, while Raglan (on the Pontypool line) never regained
the services of Mr J.H. Jennings (both men were Traffic staff).
Their names remain on the general Great Western war memorial
at Exeter St. Davids station (platform 5 - it is hard to picture
staff from quiet single track branchlines being recorded for
posterity on one of the Great Western's principle stations. Such
was the levelling effect of the Great War).
There was also a slight
reduction in importance for Troy station with the death of the
Coleford Branch on the 1st of January 1917. The rails were shipped
to France, and sunk in the English Channel (or at least rumour
has it that they were; Brian Handley obtained this interesting
nugget from someone, who probably heard it from someone else.
Apparently this story is also told about the rails and locomotive
fleet of the Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appleford Railway and
is also circulated about the rails from the Great Western's Uxbridge
High Street Branch and the Caledonian's Inchture Village line.
Maybe one ship was sunk with rails on board and everybody claimed
that it was their railway. Maybe it's just an urban legend. Maybe
they were all on the same ship). The line never re-opened, although
a stub to Whitecliff Quarry, half a mile from Coleford, survived
for another 50 years until mid-1967. Tidenham station also spent
a brief period out of use through 1917 to free up personnel (in
those days it would have released the signalman, station master
and a couple of porters - every little helps), briefly leaving
the line with three intermediate stations at Tintern, Bigsweir
and Redbrook. The WVR's southernmost station re-opened in 1918
and services returned to normal.
Following the end of
the First World War, large numbers of ex-service personnel bought
their Army lorries with their demobilisation payout and set up
haulage firms. These were able to operate a more competitive
service than the increasingly distant monolithic railways, firmly
regulated by 70-year-old Acts of Parliament and with infrastructure
which had not been properly invested in during the First World
War. The old turnpikes had been abandoned by long-distance transport
for 60 years, but they were better than the mud tracks that the
lorries had been built to drive across. The Government solved
the problem by making the railway companies bigger, more distant
and more monolithic by Grouping them into the Big Four during
1922. This brought the Ross and Monmouth Railway, which had managed
to remain independent, under full Great Western control for the
first time. It gave the Great Western some more funds, as it
was essentially taken over by the excessively profitable South
Welsh colliery railways, which were perfectly happy to pour money
down holes in the ground since they knew lots of big holes which
they could dig more money out of. It resulted in no immediate
change to the Wye Valley line. When Government investment did
come, later in the 1920s, it came to the road network, building
new roads and beginning a massive improvement scheme which involved
surfacing a vast number of roads with tarmac. This new, improved
road network, built for a competitive future, was very well placed
to destroy the railways, built for a monopoly-based past. The
WVR, like many similar lines, was pretty much doomed; it was
more a matter of when it would go rather than if.
1925 brought the railway
back to the Great Western's attention again briefly. On the 7th
of March the 3.55pm "down" train from Monmouth was
15 minutes into its journey and rolling happily down the long,
gentle bank past Whitebrook when the rocking train swayed at
about line speed (38-40mph) into the curve a ¼ south of
Whitebrook Crossing, about a mile north of St Briavels station.
It derailed. The locomotive, No. 1254, was a little tank engine
running bunker first and hauling some five coaches - Nos 1213,
1119, 6049, 1138 and 543, none of which more than 30ft long (so
the entire train, with its 30ft locomotive, was 186ft long -
about the length of a modern three-car Sprinter set). The accident
report, available at The
Railway Archive
(again an external link), is uncertain about the causes. There
don't appear to have been any; the train simply left the rails,
possibly due to the axles not being able to sway enough when
the loco scuttled around bends, and the only conclusion come
to was that the GWR might like to consider deploying something
other than an 0-6-0 pannier tank on this sort of working. Despite
the lack of knowledge on why the train derailed, the report is
very informative about the track and trains of the time. The
loco appeared to be one of four regulars to the line, while the
stock was the normal set. The train was naturally running late
(about two minutes, but it was making no attempt to make up time);
it is interesting that both trains involved in accidents on the
WVR were late and prompts thoughts that this was probably routine.
With ten passengers and three crew members on board it was not
what one might call well-loaded - there were about two people
per vehicle and one crew member for every three passengers.
Assuming that this sort
of loading was typical during the early inter-war years, it is
no particular suprise that during the late 1920s and early 1930s,
the Great Western Railway attempted to fight back and added several
Halts along the line (well, maybe it is a surprise - similar
loadings on the nearby Severn and Wye network got its passenger
trains axed in 1929. Evidently the GWR reckoned that the WVR
offered some increased revenue opportunities. The fact that it
owned the entire WVR, while the Severn and Wye was shared with
the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, probably helped). Trains
then stopped at Tidenham, Netherhope Halt, Tintern, Brockweir
Halt, Llandogo Halt, St Briavels, Whitebrook Halt, Penallt Halt,
Redbrook, Wyesham Halt, and Monmouth Troy. Wyesham Halt was built
on the site of Wyesham Junction, where the lines for Chepstow
and Coleford divided. Two trains ran each way each day on Sundays
(any Sunday service was unusual on branchlines at the time).
Diesel railcars were introduced to the area in place of steam
traction and, despite being experimental, worked rather well
and became very popular. An example of the earlier half of the
fleet can be seen in a photograph at Netherhope in Camp Coach
Holidays on the GWR (page 11; by Mike Fenton). Comments in
the advertising for the railcars suggest that the rural branch
lines that they ended up on would otherwise have been doomed
to closure in the late '30s or early '40s.
The late 1930s batch
of railcars, with a more angular front end, easier access to
buffers and coupling gear and gears set up for slower speeds
and frequent stops became a defining feature of the Wye Valley
and Pontypool lines as several were based at Newport - the line
between Ross and Monmouth had its stock supplied from Hereford
and tended to be worked by steam locos throughout its life. Although
many of the steam locos which appeared at Monmouth were still
0-6-0 pannier tanks, 0-4-2 side-tank jobbies (initially 48xx,
until they were renumbered in 1946 into the 14xx slot) were also
common in the area. The improvements seemed to be moderately
successful; the June 1935 traffic returns show a more healthy
average of about 16 passengers per train at any given moment,
so the line may have managed to cover its staffing costs at this
point.
In 1935 a very hot summer
saw the demise of the Wireworks Branch when the rails buckled.
For the last few years it had been worked by horses; horses were
still used for shunting and the odd branch line but using them
for working a line built for steam engines was very rare (although
it had been contemplated for a period by, surprise surprise,
the Forest of Dean Central Railway). The line had never made
any profit so it was not reopened, and there was no use for buckled
rails so they stayed where they were. When the Second World War
broke out in 1939, a use for the rails finally appeared, with
the line going in 1940 and the junction being lifted in 1945. |
|
British
Rail Ownership 1945-1959
The Second World War
damaged the Big Four in much the same way (although more impressively)
that the First had damaged the pre-Grouping companies. The Government
decided that four big, independent companies really didn't fit
in with its agenda and nationalised them into British Railways.
Monmouth's little network came under the Western Region. The
Western Region was the GWR in a new coat but with slightly less
independence and much less money. The Second World War had put
a nasty dent in South Wales's coal trade. Furthermore, the South
Welsh profits now had to be shared with other members of the
Big Four. There was less money available for the network around
the Wye Valley and the Forest of Dean. Little lines, such as
the Forest of Dean Central Railway, slipped quietly away. If
an unprofitable line was becoming hard to operate or needed major
investment, it was liable to face the axe.
Thus it came as little
surprise, although it was still rather alarming, when in 1954
British Railways announced plans for the imminent demise of the
railway from Monmouth to Pontypool.
This idea met with some
controversy - the line was rural and lightly worked but saw moderately
good loadings and was generally a good railway. BR was therefore
persuaded by the local residents to build a new halt and improve
the service instead. For six months 11 trains each way each day
were provided, nearly triple the normal 4 for such a remote branch
line, but for this two trains and crews had to be deployed, doubling
operating costs. To put this figure into context for this single
track branch line, Pontypool Road (now Pontypool and New Inn)
station currently receives 15 trains each way each day (at irregular
intervals) while 16 trains call at Chepstow station each way
each day (on a sort of clockface timetable with every third train
missing). Few single-track branch lines now receive more than
ten trains each way each day. The service improvements meant
that revenue was also doubled, but that meant that the gap between
costs and revenue doubled too, BR declared that the line was
still unremunerative and the closure proposals were revived,
much to the complaints of residents who just wanted a better
timed service with possibly 6 trains each way each day. The way
in which the service was suddenly improved, given just enough
time to bed in and then slashed again led to suggestions that
it was a deliberate ploy to lose the line. This had no effect
on the decision, with a solid Transport Users Consultation Committee
(TUCC) decision to close the line with 10 votes to 2.
Had the service been
reduced to 6 trains each way each day, a few investments been
made in the structures along the route and all the stations reduced
to unstaffed halts, possibly with the loss of goods trains except
for at Usk and Monmouth, the passenger numbers might well have
held up and the railway might have survived. Had BR maintained
the 11 trains each way each day for 12 months and made sure that
branch trains linked into mainline ones to Newport at Pontypool
Road (maybe with a daily through train) passenger numbers could
well have grown further, particularly if the service proved reliable,
and possibly even attracted population growth from housing development
which could have secured the line's future. However, BR didn't
want to go to that much trouble for a small corner of the network
which would probably still have made a loss and still have needed
extensive work on intermediate structures. The railway was not
sufficiently mechanised then to work the many gated level crossings
without individually staffing each and every one of them and
cutting staff would be virtually impossible, as was shown when
ASLEF, the footplatemens' union, went on strike on the 28th of
May over their claim that the gap between their pay and the pay
of guards and station staff was not big enough. The union reached
a settlement on the 14th of June - the proposed closure date,
so that this railway was closed 17 days early. Following this,
the single track line was used for wagon storage. It was not
until the 12th of November 1957 that a special train traversed
the branch, celebrating 100 years since the railway was opened
and, more importantly, 100 years since the first train to Monmouth.
The line was dismantled shortly afterwards, and parts of the
trackbed have now been obliterated by the A449 dual carridgeway.
The loss of the line
to Pontypool turned Monmouth Troy into a terminus with all services
entering the station from the eastern end. A timber merchant
at the west end of Monmouth Tunnel meant that the occasional
train still ran through the station, but such trains were goods
only and all passenger trains now went out of the station in
the same direction as they had entered from. This offered opportunities
to simplify Troy and reduce certain expenses. As goods trains
from Ross and Chepstow used the same yard on the north side of
the station there was no option of removing all the junction
pointwork and giving each branch their own platform, with no
physical connection between the lines (although some trackwork
and signalling reductions could have been made - but extensive
trackwork modifications are expensive compared with leaving be,
particularly when dealing with lines with poor short-term futures).
However, as Troy had fairly long platforms and trains never exceeded
one autocoach and one tank engine in length, it was possible
to put all passenger trains in the same platform. Thus it appears
that at some point around July 1957 the station footbridge disappeared
and Platform 2 essentially fell out of use, with the two branch
lines using the main platform with the larger awning and restaurant
facilities. The Stephenson Locomotive Society Railtour run to
commemorate 100 years of the Coleford, Monmouth, Usk and Pontypool
Railway on the 12th October 1957 occupied all of platform 1,
pushing regular trains into platform 2, but that seems to have
been pretty much the end of the line for the second platform.
Further signalling economies
were obtained in the area by closing Monmouth May Hill box in
April 1958. At this late stage the savings on the signalman and
maintenance costs over the eight months which passenger trains
in the area had left were probably negated by the cost of removing
May Hill signal arms from their posts and dismantling the interlocking
in the signal box. Troy would remain largely untouched until
August 1959, when the station was stripped of all signalling
and point locking following the end of passenger services.
After the closure of
the Pontypool line the diesel railcars fell due for major overhauls.
New railcars were being built; the ex-GWR fleet was obsolete,
so they were simply withdrawn. There had been enough line closures
to displace sufficient steam engines to take up the slack on
all services. This led to a certain rise in costs and some damage
to passenger numbers as older, dirtier trains took over workings.
British Rail had a very simple solution to this, which prompted
the final appearance of the Wye Valley Railway in The Times
on 19th September 1958. It was a short letter from the Monmouth
Town Clerk, pleading for support for the railway. There were
plans to close it, and all the local councils and most of the
locals were against it. Two major issues emerged: firstly, this
time Monmouth would be losing its rail service; secondly, the
lines could be made to make more money by improving the service.
The response from BR to the first one was that Monmouth wasn't
using the trains anyway, while the second point probably got
"we've heard that one before" and the closure process
continued.
The TUCC decision was
that the only two places which could not be served easily and
much more cheaply by buses were Whitebook on the Wye Valley and
Hadnock on the Ross and Monmouth. Both places - especially Whitebrook
- are now exceedingly remote and hard to get to, but as the combined
populations probably amount to less than 100 people even today,
25 miles of otherwise unprofitable railway could not be justified,
especially with separate working on both lines and a reversal
with a possible long wait for connections at Monmouth (one of
the major points of contention - the two lines, with stock provided
from different sheds, had never produced a timetable where connections
were possible at Troy all through the day). BR refused to reverse
their decision, and inhabitants of Monmouth and many other beautiful,
romantic places in the lower Wye Valley lost their passenger
rail service from the 5th of January 1959. This time closure
went without a hitch.
It is believed that only
one train actually ever ran direct from Chepstow to Ross-on-Wye
via Monmouth - it was provided by the Stephenson Locomotive Society
on the 4th of January 1959 as the closure special. There seems
to be little which had prevented starting such a service in 1955
following the closure of the line to Pontypool, but the Ross-on-Wye
trains instead just terminated at Troy, more or less on the same
timetable for the half still operated as when they had gone all
the way to Pontypool. This was probably a combination of habit
and the issues around the Ross and Monmouth and Wye Valley trains
being provided by different sheds which drew up their train diagrams
without consulting their colleagues too much. Certainly they
would wish to avoid the risks of locomotives ending up at the
wrong shed which would be brought about by through running. The
special was hauled by 6412 and 6439, a pair of pannier tanks
of a design in the picture below, and while 6439 was broken up
for scrap many years ago, 6412 is now based on the South Devon
Railway, between Totnes and Buckfastleigh in South Devon, with
occasional excursions elsewhere. It was on one of these adventures
that it was tracked down and photographed by the WVR research
team, and is seen below at Toddington in 2003.
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British
Rail Ownership 1959-1990
The northern end of the
Ross and Monmouth Railway and the entire Wye Valley Railway were
retained for goods traffic. This offered savings in wear and
tear and on the expense of operating passenger trains but retained
the what profits there were along the lines to offset the cost
of maintaining the structures along the line. It also reduced
the paperwork that would have to be filled in if one of the lines'
decaying structures fell to bits around train. The Ross and Monmouth
served a wireworks near Lydbrook, about halfway up the line,
which kept the northern half running into 1965. The WVR was left
to serve Monmouth's gas works (Monmouth May Hill), Monmouth's
general goods requirements (Monmouth Troy), Redbrook's tinplate
works, Tintern's general goods traffic and Tintern Quarry. This
left the Wye Valley Railway with full possession of both of Monmouth's
stations. Monmouth Troy, which had once been a fairly bustling
country junction with services peaking at 19 trains passenger
and three goods trains each day in 1954, now seemed very big
and empty less than ten years later around the pannier tank,
short rake of goods wagons and "Toad" brake van which
had worked the solitary daily freight train (Sundays excepted)
from Chepstow. However, it was still a more satisfactory investment
than the Forest of Dean Central Railway, which was dismantled
in April 1959, had ever been.
In 1961 the line north
of Tintern Quarry was finally placed under the threat of a finishing
blow, with the closure of Redbrook tinplate works, an end to
a long history of tinplate working in lower Redbrook, and the
closure of the last manufacturing facility in the Lower Wye Valley.
The site has been steadily cleared since, and not much now remains.
Trains to Monmouth gasworks ceased in November 1963, leaving
only basic goods traffic working north of Tintern Quarry. Five
or so wagons a day did not bring in enough money to justify 13
miles of track and wagonload traffic was deemed to be unprofitable.
A line depending on it exclusively for its income was not going
to last long.
The WVR managed to survive
like this for just under two months before the axe finally fell
on 6th January 1964 when goods facilities were withdrawn north
of Tintern Quarry. A requirement of the 'closure to passengers'
bill was that the line had to be left in place for three years
after abandonment, with the aim of providing the opportunity
for the local authority or a handy preservation group to take
over the line. BR honoured this promise, and then started dismantling
at the end of the period in 1967. Although the northern end of
the Ross and Monmouth line had survived into 1965, the section
between Lydbrook, Symonds Yat and Monmouth May Hill had closed
altogether in 1959 and so was lifted in 1962. Once dismantling
here had commenced, the Wye Valley line gained a slightly dubious
honour - the last railway serving Monmouth along which it was
still possible to run a train to Monmouth Troy station.
After closure, the stations
all had very different histories. The halts were demolished shortly
after closure, excepting Llandogo and Netherhope. Llandogo remained
as a large platform-shaped object in the middle of a field; the
area for the track was filled in during the 1970s and the halt
site is now much harder to spot. Netherhope's platform also survived
into the 1970s and even retained the posts for the halt nameboard,
but it appears to have been removed around its 40th birthday.
Given that both finally vanished around the same time, it is
quite likely that the timber platform walls were beginning to
give way and there was a risk of the mud platforms collapsing.
Monmouth Troy was acquired
by a coal merchant who demolished the refreshment room, the shelter
on the second platform and the signal box. He also found that
the demise of the railway gave him more room but meant that he
had to use lorries for all his transport. After that business
finished the site fell into disuse and the main building was
taken to Winchcombe station on the preserved Gloucestershire
& Warwickshire Railway in 1986. The goods shed remained on
site and was demolished in 2002 to make way for a small housing
estate. However, the two platforms remain abandoned with the
gap for the tracks filled in. The only identification features
are the tunnel at the west end of the station, and some of the
ramp at the east end. The two viaducts cross the Wye to the east.
Redbrook station was
demolished in the late 1960s. It was briefly taken over by a
restaurant and a petrol station. Redbrook, however, had proved
too obscure to retain its rail service and was hardly going to
attract enough business to keep services available for the motorist.
Both had gone by 1980 and now two back gardens lie across the
station site. The site is crossed about half way up its length
by the English-Welsh border, so the Northern half is in Monmouthshire,
Wales, and the Southern half in Gloucestershire, England.
St Briavels is still
in situ and in use by a fishing group, who have allowed
ivy to grow on the unused (but, unlike the other three built
by the WVR, intact) goods shed and lost the signal box to road
improvements, but are generally keeping the site in very good
condition. The small, well-looked-after building remains; the
one at Redbrook was essentially identical.
Tintern was derelict
for many years, before being preserved as a tourist attraction.
Here there are an exhibition, facilities and a miniature railway,
making it an excellent place to break a journey. There is also
a shop in the old signal box, which is the only one of the four
built by the WVR to survive.
Tidenham has a rather
more interesting history, which means that it has lost its goods
shed (identical to that at St Briavels), its signal box (probably
identical to that at Tintern) and its station building (which
was unique to this one of the four). After being closed as a
halt in 1959, the station was converted into a stone loading
area for Dayhouse Quarry, with a new loop being constructed.
Stone trains also ran through to Tintern Quarry, just north of
Tidenham Tunnel, until rocks started falling from the tunnel
lining and an intermediate overbridge began to collapse. The
route was mothballed north of Tidenham, the line being left in
situ but the services being withdrawn. Dayhouse Quarry continued
to provide traffic for the stub of the line.
Sunday 13th August 1978
was an important day in WVR history - it was, to date, the last
working of a locomotive-hauled passenger train through Tidenham
Tunnel when the Tintern Totter railtour worked from Worcester
to Tintern Quarry, in the control of a single-cab 1000hp locomotive
with a long nose which is technically known as a Class 20. This
machine could still operate a repeat as it is now owned by the
Type One Locomotive Company (and doesn't weigh much), but the WVR would
not be capable of taking it and the three coach train now unless
major vegetation clearance was carried out. The special was one
of several to Tintern Quarry during the 1970s and the only one
to be hauled by a locomotive. Stone traffic through Tidenham
Tunnel to Tintern Quarry ceased at the end of 1981 and the condition
of the route soon precluded the running of further specials.
This was followed by
what might pass as a resurgence of interest, with proposals for
re-opening, a society being set up locally to preserve materials
relating to the railway in 1980 (the current status of said society
is unknown), and a string of further railtours, which now have
their own webpage here. The final few tours terminated
in the loop at Tidenham, which presented an interesting opportunity
to stand on a length of double track railway and photograph the
train without a risk of being run over.
A group also emerged
calling for the line to be re-opened along the lines of the Tyne
and Wear Metro in Newcastle, arguing that it would be quite cheap
compared to certain parts of the defence budget (e.g. Eurofighter
aircraft) and would provide a much bigger boost to the quality
of people's lives in the Wye Valley area. The proposal - to re-open
not just the Wye Valley line but also the Ross and Monmouth and
Hereford, Ross and Gloucester railways - eventually sank in 1995.
It maintained awareness but was constantly beset by funding problems.
If money grew on trees it would be easy to rebuild railways in
the wooded Wye Valley - unfortunately it comes from taxpayers
and politicians, of which there are very few. Even obtaining
money for an extension of the quarry line to serve Tintern again
proved too difficult.
Instead, the rest of
the route was taken out of use in March 1990, bringing down the
curtain on special trains over what by this time was a mile-long
quarry branch - one which still offered an interesting journey,
albeit only taking in views of the Severn Estuary. This section,
which had seen more investment than the rest of the line and
featured a 1978-rebuilt bridge over the A48 at Tidenham and concrete
sleepers with modern rails, was duly left to become overgrown
like the rest, pending a resumption of traffic (at which point
the line could theoretically be resuscitated at a moment's notice)
or a handy buyer. |
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Since
abandonment
In 1993 the national
rail network was mostly privatised. Along with many other sections
of abandoned railway, the Wye Valley Railway was not included.
It instead remained in full public ownership with British Rail
until 1999, when some 200 miles of railway were partially sold
by BR in a 50:50 split with Sustrans for a token £1. This
leaves them open to reopening but also opens up the option of
converting them to cycleways in the future.
Accordingly Sustrans
began drawing up plans to turn the WVR into a cycleway, involving
the re-opening of both tunnels, the reinstatement of the bridge
across the river at Tintern, and sticking a cycleway through
Tintern station. Some years ago someone tidied up the section
between Tintern village and Tintern Quarry and installed an ash
surface for walkers; this was to be extended to provide a fully-fledged
multi-use path. When the original path went in Tintern Quarry
to Tidenham presented problems as that length was still an operational
railway. Although the tunnel and "rare life" around
the quarries presented difficulties for Sustrans, the scheme
was approved by Monmouthshire (but not Gloucestershire) in 2006
- except a judicial review was sought in August 2007. Monmouthshire
responded by settling "out of court" and the proposal
was quashed - instead, a new 12" gauge line was suggested
for Tintern station. With Monmouthshire County Council reported
to be on the verge of bankruptcy, the idea of providing funding
probably didn't appeal anyway.
Despite this setback,
in 2008 Sustrans (ever game for a go) had another attempt at
getting a cycleway through what was once the 20th longest tunnel
on the GWR, with its lengthy rugged unlined section and alleged
bat population. Gloucestershire had little difficulty in justifying
rejection. Monmouthshire rejected the new miniature gauge railway
at Tintern station again to make way for the cycleway but was
saved from having to pass comment on the cycleway itself. Subsequently,
with Tintern's proposed new miniature railway scrapped and the
cycleway doing little, the old miniature railway has been seeing
occasional use.
The removal of the junction
pointwork over an two-year period between Spring 2007 and January
2009 resulted in the surviving length of the WVR being deleted
from Ordnance Survey maps and the route now appears from one
end to the other as a dismantled railway. Looking down from bridges
4 and 5 (Bishton Lane and Netherhope Lane) onto the overgrown
running line, it is hard to believe that the track actually survives
yet. The 2009 planning application for the cycleway, however,
is now being considered and so there is a possibility that the
overgrown remnants won't be there for much longer.
The 2010 planning decision
was rather good fun all-in-all. The cycleway now had some funding
- about £375,000, derived from Sustrans winning £50million
from the Big Lottery Fund in 2007 to spend on building bridges
to link communities. Several residents around the former Netherhope
Halt had set up the Action Committee for the Protection of the
Lower Wye Valley and sent in lengthy letters of complaint to
both local authorities, threatening to sue them under human rights
law and take out injunctions preventing work being carried out
if the scheme was passed. The letters also contained some marvellous
statistics showing that people did not want cyclists using dangerous
roads to get from Brockweir to St Briavels (the planning application
suggested that once people had got to Brockweir they should proceed
to St Briavels up some roads which are steeper and twistier than
the roads that Sustrans were trying to get cyclists off). The
Lord of the Manor in Tidenham wrote in to express his concerns
while his feudal underlings in Tutshill and Chepstow largely
seemed to support the idea of the route. Wyedean School got confused
over the difference between Wye Valley Communities for Safe Cycling
and Sustrans so had to re-write its statement saying that cyclists
were free to use its car park out of school term. So many letters
were received by the Forest of Dean District Council that they
stopped acknowledging them; instead they extended the consultation
period from the normal three weeks to until the Planning Committee
met to consider the scheme.
The Forest of Dean
and Wye Valley Review enjoyed the controversy in its letters
page, generally publishing one letter from each side in each
issue (the letters getting steadily longer as time went on).
This all remained fairly amicable (by controversial cyclepath
standards) until Tidenham Parish Council announced that they
were opposing the scheme on a variety of largely reasonable grounds,
at which point the cycle lobby threw their toys out of the pram.
Teenager Tom Edwards led the charge that the Parish Council hadn't
paid adequate attention to the under-18 section of the population
and had failed to answer his questions properly. (One wonders
how someone interested in partipating in local affairs can get
to age 17 without realising that British democracy relies on
not listening too much to people.) A generic Sustrans leaflet
from 1999 was waved around to show that the security fears from
Netherhope and Brockweir were entirely unfounded and Tidenham
residents were encouraged to lobby their Parish Council to stop
claiming that Tidenham residents would have to pay through the
nose with massive council tax increases for maintenance. (Apparently
Gloucestershire County Council would foot any maintenance bill
not paid by Sustrans, so Gloucester, Cheltenham and Stroud would
actually cover most of it. The figure quoted by Sustrans is an
average of normal cycleway costs and excludes the tunnels and
the Wye crossings. It is therefore of similar value to the profit
figures produced in the same way for the prospectus of the Manchester
and Milford Railway, which never reached Milford or Manchester,
preferring to spend its time in the bankruptcy courts. The original
WVR probably got its proposed profit figures in the same way
- and look what happened to them.) Unfortunately the lobbying
led to claims that one Tidenham Parish Council representative
had been treated aggressively and Wye Valley Communities for
Safe Cycling had to ask everyone to calm down - it was, after
all, only a cyclepath. Instead they pointed to their list of
supporters, the county development schemes and their glorious
collection of rent-a-quotes who had rolled out to say how good
cycleways can be. There was even some reference to Handley's
noted reference material on the line, though sadly this website
saw little extra interest, probably due to the politics being
of no benefit to either side.
Much was made by those
opposed to the scheme of the reasons why the line was closed
in the first place (closure overtook both tunnels because they
were falling in) and the fact that the ensuing years of disuse
have done little to repair decaying structures. Sustrans, meanwhile,
explained that bringing the route back into use would help to
prevent the decay and two supporters wrote into the local press
to dispute any claims that the condition of the infrastructure
had anything to do with the closure of the lines. The bat lobby
came out against it; this section of the rail lobby put in a
couple of letters of objection and then sat back to watch with
interest (occasionally struggling to supress the urge to send
in more letters to anyone vaguely concerned and eventually putting
in a last-minute roll of the dice which had very little effect).
Legal threats made several
appearances - aside from the offers made by the Action Committee
for the Protection of the Lower Wye Valley, there were threats
from the cycling lobby to refer Tidenham Parish Council to a
standards committee for not considering the scheme properly and
active consideration by the council of the option of suing path
supporters for being nasty to them. The whole affair became somewhat
reminiscent of the original railway company's brief existence.
There is a small body of thought which expects the scheme to
bankrupt Sustrans if it ever gets built; it is, after all, a
railway which bankrupted its original builder and Sustrans wants
to reuse the most expensive section for non-revenue-earning purposes.
The scheme was nonetheless
approved by the Forest of Dean District Council on the 9th of
November 2010. Tom Edwards got to make his speech to the local
authority and did very nicely. Monmouthshire neglected to make
a decision, leaving the cycling lobby to make tweets about "less
supportive comments on the Monmouthshire website" and spend
five months with little to lobby about.
In April 2011 the legal
threats took on a substantive edge when Brockweir Cycling Concern,
who successfully killed proceedings in 2007, took the Forest
of Dean District Council off for judicial review at what the
cycling lobby called the "lastest possible opportunity".
This is normal for judicial review, which is a last resort remedy
that you can't use until all other options are exhausted. Legal
proceedings are slow things and so the decision ended up in abeyance
until they were completed. Accordingly Sustrans began to make
noises about the low liklihood that the Connect2 bits of the
scheme would be completed before the December 2012 deadline for
spending the Connect2 money. Monmouthshire's planners watched
with interest from the sidelines, presumably loath to spend money
on full planning enquiries (and judicial reviews) when a High
Court judge was likely to scrap the whole (increasingly likely
to be unfunded) scheme at any moment.
In the event the High
Court judge decided after 6 weeks or so not to take the judicial
review, leaving Sustrans with free planning permission to build
a cycleway in the Forest of Dean once Monmouthshire approved
it as well (and several residents of Brockweir with a hefty legal
bill). Monmouthshire asked for more information on the scheme.
Sustrans threw in the towel and on Friday 13th May 2011 announced
that the Connect2 money was being taken elsewhere. (Naturally
this doesn't solve all clock-ticking problems; the Forest of
Dean dropped a three-year time limit on starting work, so permission
expires in November 2013.) Thus the WVR story essentially returned
to its 1866 position - authorised for development, but stuffed
funding-wise.
Currently the railway
itself almost seems to have had a curse put on it to prevent
anyone from doing anything with the remaining track (a curse
probably known as Tidenham Tunnel). It doesn't make them come
out in spots or turn into a frog, it just means that they give
up fairly rapidly and leave people to continue destroying clothing
in their bids to reach Tidenham station and Netherhope Halt.
From early November until
late March can probably be considered to be the closed season
for the Railway as the weather is wet and cold, and the brambles
are more annoying when they're covered in water.
The line is officially
still available for reopening; unofficially, it doesn't look
like another national rail network train will ever use the line
again. |
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