The Tetbury Branch 1889 - 1964 BRITISH RAILWAYS...months after Britain’s railways were...
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Jackament’s Bottom Halt 1939-1948 Trouble House Halt 1959 Kemble Church’s Hill Halt 1959 Rodmarton Platform 1904 Culkerton 1889 Tetbury The Tetbury Branch 1889 - 1964 BRITISH RAILWAYS Tetbury Rail Lands Regeneration Trust Trouble House Halt was immortalised in the song “Slow Train” written by the British duo Flanders and Swann in July 1963. The song laments the loss of British stations and railway lines due to the Beeching cuts, as well as the passing of a way of life with the advent of mass motoring. Miller's Dale for Tideswell, Kirkby Muxloe, Mow Cop and Scholar Green No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Moretehoe On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street We won't be meeting again On the slow train. I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more No whitewashed pebbles, no Up and no Down From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town. I won't be going again On the slow train. On the Main Line and the Goods Siding The grass grows high At Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside And Trouble House Halt. The Sleepers sleep at Audlem and Ambergate. No passenger waits on Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay. No one departs, no one arrives From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives. They've all passed out of our lives On the slow train. On the slow train. Cockermouth for Buttermere The Slow Train Livestock traffic was a major source of revenue for rural branch lines and Tetbury was no exception. While the line was under construction, local farmers and businesspeople built a large new cattle market at the bottom of Gumstool Hill. The first market was held on 8 January 1890. A special train brought 120 farmers and dealers. The auctioneers, Messrs. Moore and Hills, took more than £2,000 in animal sales - enough to build Tetbury station all over again! In the 20th century, Tetbury Station’s best-remembered livestock shipment is probably the transport of Sir Charles Cooper’s complete herd of pedigree Hereford cattle and all his farm equipment from Charlton Down, just outside Tetbury, to Scotland. The train of 31 trucks and cattle wagons left Tetbury on 26 February 1963, arriving at Dunragit in Wigtownshire 16 hours later. "This is the grave That we have made For the remains Of the express trains That came in a hurry Into Tetbury borough A foolish driver it had Who treated it so bad And thro' much dictation It died of starvation People fancied at least That they'd been fleeced And others thought That they'd been caught In a trap of some sort And it never aught To have come to naught For the want of thought Some of them tried To keep him alive They kicked up a fuss But he only got wuss Till at last he died And nobody cried Save the lawyers, who saw They couldn't get any more So they agreed to stop And let the matter drop Into this large grave That I've just made" Before the Tetbury branch line opened in December 1889 there were several attempts to bring a railway to the town. The Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Junction Railway (W&GJR) drew up plans for a branch in 1845. Work started on a line from Stroud to Tetbury and Malmesbury in 1865. Work stalled due to disagreements between the shareholders, and in 1871 the company was wound up. The Trust has a copy of a very large cartoon, probably published by the Bristol Observer in 1869. It satirically comments on the money lost by private shareholders when the W&GJR was wound up. It shows an express train hurtling along, then a great train crash, followed by the funeral of the railway company. In the final scene, the grave digger declaims his thoughts on the events Early attempts to build a Tetbury branch came to naught “If Pat was late, the driver would reverse and pick her up” I lived on Fox Hill as a girl, next door to the Fox Inn. As a teenager I used to sit on a wall and watch the trains come and go. I watched as troops returning from war filed wearily onto the platform looking exhausted and dishevelled. Some were on home leave, and some were heading to Beverston or Long Newnton, where there were military camps, for rest and recuperation. I married an Air Force crew man who rode the bomb turret. He had been sent to Long Newnton for recuperation as he was suffering from exhaustion after too many bombing raids and seeing too many friends lost in aircraft that were shot down as they all flew alongside one another. When we married, our first home was one of the army huts at Long Newnton until a house could be found for us in Tetbury. It was a simple start to our married life but we were warm, dry, comfortable and happy. One person, Pat Brain, was always late for her train to work, and if she came running down Fox Hill as the train was just puffing out of the station and round the corner, someone would shout to the driver. He’d stop and reverse to the platform and wait for Pat to climb aboard before setting off again. RW “We stopped the train to pick mushrooms” TETBURY STATION used to employ the young lads who had left school but didn't have a job to go to yet. Our boss, the head cleaner was Tommy Lawler. We were given about 6d an hour (worth around £2 in 2016) and worked an eight-hour shift, so we earned 4 shillings (now equivalent to about £17). I was 16 when I started at the station. We lads used to clean the engine and the carriages at night. We started work at 10pm and finished at 6am when the engine driver would arrive in time for the first train to leave. We could get a ride sometimes and I remember riding back to Tetbury one Sunday night and the driver stopped the train where he'd spotted some mushrooms growing earlier, on his trips to and fro. We all piled off and picked bags of mushrooms, got back in the train and set off home. The halt at the Trouble House was a popular one. Men used to get off there and drink at the pub until the last train was due. Then they just had to go over the road to the halt, wave the train down and be carried home to Tetbury. HW Definitely not chicken feed: livestock revenue was vital THE TETBURY BRANCH WILD SWAN PUBLICATIONS LTD. by Stephen Randolph Stephen Randolph fell in love with the Tetbury branch when, aged 12, he moved to Tetbury from Dursely. His family rented a house next to the station and the young newcomer soon gained the confidence of the drivers and guards. Randolph finished his first attempt at writing a history of the branch just three years later! His definitive history of the line (left) was published in 1985. The Tetbury Branch tells the story of the long struggle to bring the railway to the town, the line’s heyday, the colourful characters who worked and travelled on it, and its eventual demise under the blade of the Beeching axe. It is sadly out of print: those who own one consider themselves fortunate, as second hand copies now command many times the original cover price. The book of the branch Information compiled by Tetbury Rail Lands Regeneration Trust from The Tetbury Branch by Stephen Randolph and other sources. Designed and produced by Brecon Quaddy December 2016 End of an era. The Goods Shed in 1963, a few months before the branch closed. In a few short years, the other buildings will be demolished and the tracks torn up, leaving only the Shed, the adjacent cattle loading platform and the trackbed as mute testimony to 75 years of local railway history. The Dolphins Coal and Coke Company Ltd moved out of the hut on the left and into the Shed, operating it as a coal depot for many years. “Tetbury has been isolated and in shadow for so long. The railway will bring us into contact with the outer world and will break off some of the antiquated theories and prejudices which have hampered us for so long.” Tetbury Advertiser, October 1887 The daily routine on the branch, for most of its life, was eight trains per day up and down the line, pulled by steam tank engines. The passenger service usually consisted of one or two carriages. Any freight wagons were added to the passenger train. Here, the ex-GWR O-4-2 tank locomotive locally known as ‘The Donkey’, pulls into Tetbury in a few months after Britain’s railways were nationalised. 1948 Death on the line! Death came early to the line when, on 9 October 1891, an 85-year-old man, Mr William Russell, who was partially deaf, was hit by the 17.20 from Kemble at the Larkhill crossing. The freshly-built Goods Shed in its prime at the end of the 19th century. The extension nearest the main building housed the clerk’s office while the smaller room contained the weighing equipment for the weighbridge. Horse-drawn carts and drays distributed goods arriving at the station around the town and surrounding district. Trouble House Halt is said to be the only station in England built specifically to serve a pub. On the line’s final day of passenger operation, bowler-hatted ‘mourners’ put a coffin on board the last train to Kemble at Trouble House Halt. It had been made by the landlord of the pub together with his brother, covered with inscriptions and filled with empty whisky bottles. On arrival at Kemble, the coffin was transferred to a train for Paddington, addressed to Dr. Beeching, infamous as the executor of the plan that closed thousands of miles of rural railways in the early 1960s. The crew had to put out a bonfire of hay bales on the line at Culkerton on their way back to Tetbury, where the town’s rail service ceased for ever. The Goods Shed stands partly on rubble quarried from the hillside that originally sloped down across what is now the car park. Scores of labourers excavated the hill by pick and shovel. Some are pictured here at the foot of the cliff behind the Shed. The contract for erecting the Shed and the rest of the station buildings at Tetbury, as well as making alterations to Kemble station at the other end of the branch, was let in 1887 for £1,719 - between £1.5 and £2.5 million in today’s economic values. Added to the line in 1959, in hopes of attracting passengers to the new diesel railbus service, Church’s Hill Halt was a simple, exposed platform made from sleepers. Jackament’s Bottom Halt was built in 1939 to deal with vastly-increased wartime activity at Kemble aerodrome, including hosting Troop Carrier Groups from the USAAF 9th Air Force with masses of Dakota aircraft for vital resupply missions to allied troops in recently- liberated parts of Europe. 1960 Open from 1904 until the line closed, the pretty halt at Rodmarton, seen here in 1962, was, in the words of branch historian Stephen Randolph, “rarely visited by intending passengers.” Culkerton was the sole stop on the line when the branch first opened. Villagers were served by a wooden station building, with a 200-foot platform, footbridge and a sturdy brick goods shed. A station master’s house was built later but it was never provided with mains gas, electricity or running water. Drinking water was delivered daily in milk churns. It was hardly a pleasant place to live - which may have had something to do with the high turnover of staff there. British Rail closed Culkerton in 1956, reopening it in 1959 as an unstaffed halt. Wartime needs brought extra passenger services to the branch … for a while Diesel rail buses took over passenger duties on the branch in 1959 in a bid to revive traffic and reduce running costs. Sadly it was not enough and the line closed on 4 April In marked contrast to attitudes towards today’s railway mega-projects, the Victorian public were usually eager to attract lines to their towns and villages Sixty years after its debut, the Goods Shed was still handling incoming and outbound freight every day, although the fabric of the building was showing distinct evidence of wear and tear as well as signs of the wartime neglect that still afflicted the whole of the country’s rail network. 1964 1963 c.1960 1962 1940 1920 1895 1888 1883 1944 A resident of the farm cottages just past Larkhill left a beer crate beside the track where it ran past the bottom of her garden. Every morning, the railbus stopped to wait for her at the unofficial ‘beer crate halt’ and she would use the crate to step up into the service to Tetbury. Beer crate halt Tommy Curtis worked as a guard on the branch for 40 years, from its opening day until he retired in March 1932. The train behind him is a mixture of passenger and livestock vehicles – typical of traffic on the branch, which handled 292 trucks of animals and 43,645 milk churns in 1925 as well as 13,000 tons of freight. 1932 1948 1960 The railbus idles beside the Tetbury platform at Kemble. Although it’s highly unlikely that trains will ever run between Kemble and Tetbury again, there are great hopes of reopening the route of the line as a trail for walkers, horse riders and cyclists. Tetbury signal box still exists, in almost original condition - although it now lives 120 miles away at the home of the branch’s historian, Stephen Randolph.
Transcript of The Tetbury Branch 1889 - 1964 BRITISH RAILWAYS...months after Britain’s railways were...
Jackament’s Bottom Halt1939-1948
Trouble House Halt1959
Kemble
Church’s Hill Halt1959
Rodmarton Platform 1904
Culkerton1889
Tetbury
The Tetbury Branch 1889 - 1964 BRITISH RAILWAYS Tetbury Rail LandsRegeneration Trust
Trouble House Halt was immortalised inthe song “Slow Train” written by theBritish duo Flanders and Swann in July1963. The song laments the loss of Britishstations and railway lines due to theBeeching cuts, as well as the passing of away of life with the advent of massmotoring.
Miller's Dale for Tideswell, Kirkby Muxloe,Mow Cop and Scholar Green
No more will I go to Blandford Forum andMoretehoeOn the slow train from Midsomer Norton andMumby RoadNo churns, no porter, no cat on a seatAt Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-StreetWe won't be meeting againOn the slow train.I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey toOpenshawAt Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors nomoreNo whitewashed pebbles, no Up and no DownFrom Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town.I won't be going againOn the slow train.On the Main Line and the Goods SidingThe grass grows highAt Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside
And Trouble House Halt.
The Sleepers sleep at Audlem and Ambergate.No passenger waits on Chittening platform orCheslyn Hay.No one departs, no one arrivesFrom Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.They've all passed out of our livesOn the slow train. On the slow train.Cockermouth for Buttermere
The Slow Train
Livestock traffic was a majorsource of revenue for rural branchlines and Tetbury was noexception. While the line wasunder construction, local farmersand businesspeople built a largenew cattle market at the bottom ofGumstool Hill. The first marketwas held on 8 January 1890. Aspecial train brought 120 farmersand dealers. The auctioneers,Messrs. Moore and Hills, tookmore than £2,000 in animal sales -enough to buildTetbury station alloveragain!
In the 20th century, TetburyStation’s best-rememberedlivestock shipment is probably thetransport of Sir Charles Cooper’scomplete herd of pedigreeHereford cattle and all his farmequipment from Charlton Down,just outside Tetbury, to Scotland.The train of 31 trucks and cattlewagons left Tetbury on 26 February1963, arriving at Dunragit inWigtownshire 16 hours later.
"This is the graveThat we have madeFor the remainsOf the express trainsThat came in a hurryInto Tetbury boroughA foolish driver it hadWho treated it so badAnd thro' much dictationIt died of starvationPeople fancied at leastThat they'd been fleecedAnd others thoughtThat they'd been caughtIn a trap of some sort
And it never aughtTo have come to naughtFor the want of thoughtSome of them triedTo keep him aliveThey kicked up a fussBut he only got wussTill at last he diedAnd nobody criedSave the lawyers, who sawThey couldn't get any moreSo they agreed to stopAnd let the matter dropInto this large graveThat I've just made"
Before the Tetbury branch lineopened in December 1889 therewere several attempts to bring arailway to the town. The Wiltshire &Gloucestershire Junction Railway(W&GJR) drew up plans for a branchin 1845. Work started on a line fromStroud to Tetbury and Malmesburyin 1865. Work stalled due todisagreements between theshareholders, and in 1871 thecompany was wound up.
The Trust has a copy of a very largecartoon, probably published by theBristol Observer in 1869. Itsatirically comments on the moneylost by private shareholders whenthe W&GJR was wound up. It showsan express train hurtling along, thena great train crash, followed by thefuneral of the railway company. Inthe final scene, the grave diggerdeclaims his thoughts on the events
Early attempts to build a Tetbury branch came to naught “If Pat was late, the driver would reverseand pick her up”
I lived on Fox Hill as a girl,next door to the Fox Inn. Asa teenager I used to sit on awall and watch the trainscome and go. I watched astroops returning from warfiled wearily onto theplatform lookingexhausted and dishevelled.Some were on home leave,and some were heading toBeverston or LongNewnton, where therewere military camps, forrest and recuperation.
I married an Air Force crewman who rode the bombturret. He had been sent toLong Newnton forrecuperation as he wassuffering from exhaustionafter too many bombingraids and seeing too manyfriends lost in aircraft that
were shot down as they allflew alongside oneanother. When we married,our first home was one ofthe army huts at LongNewnton until a housecould be found for us inTetbury. It was a simplestart to our married life butwe were warm, dry,comfortable and happy.
One person, Pat Brain, wasalways late for her train towork, and if she camerunning down Fox Hill asthe train was just puffingout of the station andround the corner, someonewould shout to the driver.He’d stop and reverse tothe platform and wait forPat to climb aboard beforesetting off again.
RW
“We stopped the train to pick mushrooms”
TETBURY STATION used toemploy the young lads who hadleft school but didn't have a jobto go to yet. Our boss, the headcleaner was Tommy Lawler.
We were given about 6d anhour (worth around £2 in 2016)and worked an eight-hour shift,so we earned 4 shillings (nowequivalent to about £17). I was16 when I started at the station.We lads used to clean theengine and the carriages atnight. We started work at 10pmand finished at 6am when theengine driver would arrive intime for the first train to leave.
We could get a ride sometimesand I remember riding back toTetbury one Sunday night andthe driver stopped the trainwhere he'd spotted somemushrooms growing earlier, onhis trips to and fro.
We all piled off and pickedbags of mushrooms, got back inthe train and set off home.
The halt at the Trouble Housewas a popular one. Men used toget off there and drink at thepub until the last train was due.Then they just had to go overthe road to the halt, wave thetrain down and be carried hometo Tetbury. HW
Definitely not chicken feed: livestock revenue was vital
THETETBURYBRANCH
WILD SWAN PUBLICATIONS LTD.
by Stephen Randolph
Stephen Randolph fell inlove with the Tetburybranch when, aged 12, hemoved to Tetbury fromDursely. His family renteda house next to thestation and the youngnewcomer soon gainedthe confidence of thedrivers and guards.
Randolph finished hisfirst attempt at writing ahistory of the branch justthree years later! Hisdefinitive history of theline (left) was publishedin 1985.
The Tetbury Branch tellsthe story of the longstruggle to bring therailway to the town, theline’s heyday, thecolourful characters whoworked and travelled onit, and its eventual demise
under the blade of theBeeching axe.
It is sadly out of print:those who own oneconsider themselvesfortunate, as second handcopies now command manytimes the original coverprice.
The book of the branch
Information compiledby Tetbury Rail Lands
Regeneration Trust fromThe Tetbury Branch by
Stephen Randolph and other sources.
Designed and produced byBrecon Quaddy
December 2016
End of an era. The Goods Shed in 1963, a few monthsbefore the branch closed. In a few short years, the otherbuildings will be demolished and the tracks torn up,leaving only the Shed, the adjacent cattle loadingplatform and the trackbed as mute testimony to 75 yearsof local railway history. The Dolphins Coal and CokeCompany Ltd moved out of the hut on the left and intothe Shed, operating it as a coal depot for many years.
“Tetbury has been isolated and in shadow for solong. The railway will bring us into contact with theouter world and will break off some of the antiquatedtheories and prejudices which have hampered us forso long.”
Tetbury Advertiser, October 1887
The daily routine on the branch, formost of its life, was eight trains perday up and down the line, pulled bysteam tank engines. The passengerservice usually consisted of one ortwo carriages. Any freight wagonswere added to the passenger train.Here, the ex-GWR O-4-2 tanklocomotive locally known as ‘TheDonkey’, pulls into Tetbury in a fewmonths after Britain’s railwayswere nationalised.
1948
Death on the line!Death came early to the linewhen, on 9 October 1891, an85-year-old man, Mr WilliamRussell, who was partiallydeaf, was hit by the 17.20from Kemble at the Larkhillcrossing.
The freshly-built Goods Shed in itsprime at the end of the 19th century.The extension nearest the mainbuilding housed the clerk’s office whilethe smaller room contained theweighing equipment for theweighbridge. Horse-drawn carts anddrays distributed goods arriving at thestation around the town andsurrounding district.
Trouble House Halt is said to be the only stationin England built specifically to serve a pub. Onthe line’s final day of passenger operation,bowler-hatted ‘mourners’ put a coffin on boardthe last train to Kemble at Trouble House Halt.It had been made by the landlord of the pubtogether with his brother, covered withinscriptions and filled with empty whiskybottles. On arrival at Kemble, the coffin wastransferred to a train for Paddington, addressedto Dr. Beeching, infamous as the executor ofthe plan that closed thousands of miles of ruralrailways in the early 1960s. The crew had to putout a bonfire of hay bales on the line atCulkerton on their way back to Tetbury, wherethe town’s rail service ceased for ever.
The Goods Shed stands partly onrubble quarried from thehillside that originally slopeddown across what is now the carpark. Scores of labourersexcavated the hill by pick andshovel. Some are pictured hereat the foot of the cliff behind theShed. The contract for erectingthe Shed and the rest of thestation buildings at Tetbury, aswell as making alterations toKemble station at the other endof the branch, was let in 1887for £1,719 - between £1.5 and£2.5 million in today’s economicvalues.
Added to the line in 1959, inhopes of attracting passengersto the new diesel railbusservice, Church’s Hill Halt wasa simple, exposed platformmade from sleepers.
Jackament’s Bottom Halt wasbuilt in 1939 to deal withvastly-increased wartimeactivity at Kemble aerodrome,including hosting TroopCarrier Groups from theUSAAF 9th Air Force withmasses of Dakota aircraft forvital resupply missions toallied troops in recently-liberated parts of Europe.
1960
Open from 1904 until the line closed,the pretty halt at Rodmarton, seen herein 1962, was, in the words of branchhistorian Stephen Randolph, “rarelyvisited by intending passengers.”
Culkerton was the sole stop on the linewhen the branch first opened. Villagerswere served by a wooden stationbuilding, with a 200-foot platform,footbridge and a sturdy brick goodsshed. A station master’s house wasbuilt later but it was never providedwith mains gas, electricity or runningwater. Drinking water was delivereddaily in milk churns. It was hardly apleasant place to live - which may havehad something to do with the highturnover of staff there. British Railclosed Culkerton in 1956, reopening itin 1959 as an unstaffed halt.
Wartime needs brought extra passengerservices to the branch … for a while
Diesel rail buses took over passenger dutieson the branch in 1959 in a bid to revivetraffic and reduce running costs. Sadly it wasnot enough and the line closed on 4 April
In marked contrast to attitudestowards today’s railway
mega-projects, the Victorian publicwere usually eager to attract lines to
their towns and villages
Sixty years after its debut, the Goods Shed wasstill handling incoming and outbound freightevery day, although the fabric of the building wasshowing distinct evidence of wear and tear aswell as signs of the wartime neglect that stillafflicted the whole of the country’s rail network.
1964
1963
c.1960
1962
1940
1920
18951888
1883
1944
A resident of thefarm cottages justpast Larkhill left abeer crate beside thetrack where it ran past thebottom of her garden. Everymorning, the railbus stoppedto wait for her at theunofficial ‘beer crate halt’and she would use the crateto step up into the service toTetbury.
Beer crate halt
Tommy Curtis worked as aguard on the branch for 40years, from its opening dayuntil he retired in March 1932.The train behind him is amixture of passenger andlivestock vehicles – typical oftraffic on the branch, whichhandled 292 trucks of animalsand 43,645 milk churns in1925 as well as 13,000 tons offreight.
1932
1948
1960 The railbus idles beside theTetbury platform at Kemble.Although it’s highly unlikelythat trains will ever runbetween Kemble and Tetburyagain, there are great hopesof reopening the route of theline as a trail for walkers,horse riders and cyclists.
Tetbury signal box still exists, in almostoriginal condition - although it now lives120 miles away at the home of the branch’shistorian, Stephen Randolph.
