Memoirs of a Railway Volunteer - Part 0

The End of the Beginning.

It comes as a bit of a shock to realise that it is now nearly 29 years since Peak Rail began work at its Buxton site. How on earth did I get involved in all this, and to such a depth?
I joined the Peak Railway Society while I was at Durham University, out of sheer curiosity. I had no intention of getting actively involved, but a chap called Ron Holditch was setting up a branch based on Mansfield, which was close to my parents home in Worksop. He wrote and invited me to the first meeting, so I went – and got hooked. Please don’t ask me why. I know there were more sensible schemes I could have joined, but this one got under my skin. I always say, I didn’t choose this project; it chose me.
I joined one or two working parties at Matlock in 1979, but I didn’t really get stuck in until Peak rail began work at Buxton in 1980, and I was there on the first day. This was before the Buxton inner relief road was built, and Peak rail leased most of the Buxton (Midland) site, which was badly overgrown. The last substantial building left was the goods shed which had several large holes in the roof. In the present day the empty remainder of the land is no more than five minutes walk from my office, but I haven’t been there for around ten years; it holds too many ghosts for me. In my minds eye I can see it exactly as it was, and the remains are too painful; however I may rationalise the reasons for abandoning the site, and they were good reasons, I put too much of myself into building it up. This account of our early days is based partly on an article I wrote for Steam Railway over twenty years ago, and you may like to compare this story with some of our later adventures to see how our capabilities evolved over the years.
Peak Rail was not a respectable scheme in the early 1980’s. The volunteers were a fairly wild and harum scarum lot, and there were some complete dreamers among the directors. I suppose a lot of railway schemes are like that in the early days. Just what the directors were thinking we were never quite sure as we saw so little of them, we did hear that they spent a lot of time debating the colour of the umberellas they would order for Millers Dale Station when the railway got that far. I distinctly remember one of them turning up to lay track in open toed sandals. Slowly the younger volunteers gained experience and began to look about them. We were scratching away with next to no money, every weekend we struggled to fill a 10 ton ship with shovels picks and wheelbarrows.
One of the first tracklaying jobs I can remember was refurbishing MOD pattern sleepers for laying inside the goods shed. These are siding quality sleepers with mild steel reinforcing made during WWII when there was a shortage of timber. Somebody had picked up a quantity of these without chairs on, and the thread on every bolt had to be re-cut by hand with as die nut, which was a very slow process. Assembling enough to lay 120’ of track inside the goods shed was a considerable achievement. I followed Ron’s example and wrote personally to any new members joining in the Worksop area, and quite a few of them became active members – Chris Booth, Clive Haigh, and above all, a signalman called Gordon Bennett, who remains on the board of Peak Rail plc to this day, and featured in my later adventures. Gordon and Chris, also a signalman, arranged for me to pick up odd bits and pieces from time to time, for example four or five S1 chairs, which I would run over to Buxton in the boot of my car. By such slow degrees was our organisation developed!
Hard conditions bonded the volunteers together, and they began to sleep on site wherever they could. One of the first railway vehicles on site was an ex-LNWR 6 wheel “Pooley” van, which was used by Pooley’s Ltd as a travelling base when their staff travelled around calibrating weighbridges which they manufactured. It had a big cast iron range at one end, and one vile night in the winter, some volunteers came back from the pub and built a roaring fire in it. After a bit someone who had stayed in woke up and said, “Did you take my gas canister out of the oven?” For goodness knows what reason he had put the spare cartridge for his camping stove in there, it was rapidly hurled out into the darkness. A bit later the same character failed to buy his round once too often, he claimed poverty and we picked him up by his ankles at the bar of the pub, and shook him to see what fell out of his pockets.
Such hard cases could really only be led by harder cases still, and one of the first natural leaders to emerge was Phil Brown. He was a surveyor who put up industrial buildings for a living, which gave him a certain natural authority. He was a huge chap with a bushy beard, and immense strength. He never swore unless he was very happy or very angry, which last was very rare. If he was angry, he whispered – the original gentle giant. If you were anywhere near Phil, somehow you found yourself doing what he was doing and under his direction, because he knew what he was about and he was not the sort of person you argued with twice. His primary reason for being at Buxton was that with some friends, he had just bought 9F No. 92214, and he needed somewhere to put it and restore it.
One of Phil’s earliest projects was to put up a second hand wooden shed on a concrete base. I think it was originally intended as a store for the 9F, but somehow it became the infamous Buxton Mess Hut. It was painted red, and had a coal fired stove in the middle. Eventually it acquired a gas cooker, a sink and benches. It was not more than 12 feet by nine, and anything up to five volunteers slept in it, in any space they could find and utter squalor. Shortly after it was erected, we held a transport weekend , with traction engines, vintage buses and other attractions on site. On the Saturday night, the stock of bottled beer from the beer tent was commandeered on sale or return and taken to the mess hut.
After several hours, things got a bit boisterous and one of the traction engine drivers was distinctly heard to say, “That thing outside is a heap of --------g scrap and you’ll never get it going”. At this point, Phil, who was an ’eavy metal fan, was sitting between the site P.A. loudspeakers, which were set up three feet apart and playing Def Leppard at full volume. He had a pint glass in his hand, the content of which was going down to meet its friends, and a seraphic smile on his face. The smile vanished, and underneath the music, he was distinctly heard to say, very quietly, “Well! If you think that, you’ve got a set of scrap ---------g brains.”
It was a bit like one of those old western films, you know, the rough saloon full of smoke, the good guy has four aces, the card sharp has five, everyone goes quiet and backs against the wall or dives out the window. Fortunately the traction engine man had the good grace to apologise, and Phil began smiling again. I vaguely remember staggering out of the hut in the small hours of the morning to find blue flashing lights, and being interrogated by a police officer. Did I know anything about a Fordson tractor? “Yes officer, there’s four of them over there”. This did not seem to be the answer they were looking for, but I went to answer the call of nature and headed back to my sleeping bag.
In the morning it turned out that one of our visitors, known locally as Mad Mike S........ had made a pass at some girls camping on site, got shot down and crashed in flames. He took the huff and set off for home on his Fordson, which had no lights, and somewhere the police gave chase. He gave them the slip in the narrow back streets of Buxton. Yes, on a tractor! Mind you, he was also notorious for having tried to race a Triumph Spitfire in his Reliant Robin. He was doing quite well until he got to the Ashwood Dale roundabout and rolled it. When he got back onto site, he parked next to all the others and hid out in some bushes till the fuss died down. Many years later we acquired a Fordson of our own, and when we had done with it, put it up for sale. When I heard just who wanted to buy it, I did my best to veto the deal, on the grounds that you shouldn’t sell six shooters to Red Injuns, you shouldn’t sell razors to Glaswegians, and you definitely shouldn’t sell Fordson tractors to Mad Mike S.......!
Once the mess hut was up, the volunteers had somewhere to meet and drink tea, so they immediately began plotting. They were not specifically plotting against the board, just trying to get organised. They regarded the directors, when they thought of them at all, as an embarrassment. Perhaps that was rather unfair; the younger volunteers were a pretty fiery lot and only Phil Brown and Martyn Ashworth could control them. One evening there was some sort of horseplay which ended in a tin of peas being stuffed in the stove. This resulted in an explosion which blew the stove to pieces and plastered the whole of the inside of the hut with a splattering of mushy peas. I arrived the following morning just as a replacement stove, sourced overnight, was being hurriedly installed very early before Phil arrived so as to deflect his wrath. However I do remember one director issuing a public statement to the effect that Peak Rail would very easily achieve a connection with British Railways. We didn’t believe a word of it, nor did the BR area manager who publicly challenged him and he had no choice but to resign.
In the power vacuum which appeared to exist, the volunteers formed the Buxton Site Commitee, under Phil and Martyn, which raised money and set tactical policy at monthly open meetings where the volunteers settled any differences they might have among themselves; at first it was a virtual declaration of independence, gradually leading members of the committee began to get co-opted onto the board as vacancies occurred, Phil and Martyn in particular. The board began to get their act in gear, and organised a bond issue and a share issue, which enabled us to buy the freehold of the site and to buy quite a quantity of miscellaneous track from British Railways, from disused sidings at Chinley and Hindlow, and more MOD pattern sleepers from the Stantondale Foundry. In our inexperience we salvaged the material largely by hand and it was all very hard work.
With this material we were able to develop a system of sidings around the goods shed, and a passenger line running up towards the old platform. On this we ran passenger trains hauled by Brookes No.1 consisting of either a BR Mark 1 brake, or a TSO plus a GWR “Toad” brake van, bought by Volunteer X after local use on Sandite duties.
The brake van came to a sad sort of an end; it was in full GWR livery when it came to site as a result of some local initiative. However the roof leaked and the steel uprights on one side were slightly bent inwards, it looked like it had had a minor glancing collision. X set about the restoration with misplaced zeal and an oxy-propane torch. He began by burning through the bolts holding the roof seal around the chimney. The cut bolts fell down inside the van where, being red hot, they set a smouldering fire to the floor. X did not realise this until much later, by which time the floor boards around the guards stove had mostly burnt through. He said nothing to anyone, and the next time the van was shunted, the stove fell through the floor, jamming the brakes. He continued the restoration by removing absolutely all timber from the body, much of which he then strapped to his bicycle over several journeys to take back to his flat “for restoration”. X then scraped all the paint off the skeleton, which he allowed to rust rather than immediately painting the freshly bared steel. One day he confided in me that he intended to turn the van upside down in the car park so he could grind the rust off the bottom........I think the van went to Tyseley after 1990.
The track we had salvaged was not brilliant quality, and we had to pay what British Railways regarded as a commercial price. We had ambitions to develop Buxton as a terminus, and in particular that meant putting in a crossover and a new running line, to act as one half of a run round loop, so we needed two really good turnouts for a start. We made enquiries with the track merchants, and a good second hand turnout was going to cost in the region of £5000; we simply did not have that sort of money, and if we did then it was going into the Buxton Bridge Fund.
I had been looking around at what other railways did, mostly through their own society journals, and thought I saw a trend. Many of them were getting track from industrial sidings, some of which was donated, and by oil companies in particular. I was working in the Northeast and had renewed my old contacts with the Tanfield Railway who specialised in this sort of thing. I had given a hand when they lifted the Ransom Hoffman Pollard sidings at Annfield Plain; I thought we could learn a lot from their technique. At one of the monthly site meetings I rashly suggested to the unwashed horde that it was time we made a big effort to sort out the track.
The response was predictable, “If you want it - you organise it.” But that is what railway preservation is all about. I was joined by two other volunteers, Gary Dixon and Simon Foster who also tended to specialise in Permanent Way work, and together we set out to make a plan. The board made it quite clear we could do as we wished as long as we didn’t ask for money. We could expect some support from the volunteers site fund which raised money by collecting a levy from the volunteers and selling scrap metal and old newspapers, but its resources were very limited.
We examined many disused sidings without finding anything suitable, but then I spotted a series of oil sidings on one industrial estate on the south side of Nottingham, which were marked on the current rail system atlas. I went down there to explore and found that the estate was actually called “Oil Sites Road”. The branch leading to it was disconnected and in the process of being lifted, so only the delivery sidings were left. I gleaned addresses and phone numbers from the yellow pages and set to work. The first set was owned by Total. They wanted the material to use elsewhwere. The second had been sold by Shell for scrap the week before. The third set belonged to Esso, and after writing a careful begging letter I rang up and asked to speak to the site engineer. My unique selling proposition was that we would be very careful and would not wish to use gas cutting gear, at least not very much.
Yes, he said, he would be quite glad to dispose of his sidings to us. The price? There wasn’t one: provided their accountants could be persuaded to write off the installation as having no value then the sidings would be donated to us. I was left holding the phone in something of a state of shock. This was beginner’s luck with a vengeance.
Some months went by as we waited for the final clearance to come through. It was an anxious period; the days were shortening and I had been told that the site must be cleared by Christmas. The weather at Buxton was an old enemy by that time. There was the dreadful if remote possibility that the company might change its mind.
In the meantime we began to organise ourselves for the job. It was obvious from the start that it would not be straightforward. A fire access road crossed the site and some of the rails were set in Tarmac, including most of one of the turnouts. Most of the plain rails were flat bottom and bolted to a huge concrete slab instead of to sleepers. Every thirty inches there was a cast iron base plate under each rail with two bolts fastening the base plate to the concrete and two more fastening the baseplate to the rail. The site had been a petrol terminal and the owners were distinctly nervous about the use of gas cutting gear on site. Finally we were operating fifty miles aweau from out base and most of our volunteers in that area were about to begin dismantling Rowsley station against a strict deadline.
The Rowsley Station project caused a certain amount of friction. The idea was to rebuild it at Buxton, however to Phil Brown’s mind the idea was just not on, because he believed Peak Rail had no plan which would support the cost of transport and re-building. However it was a historic bulding on our doorstep and many of our supporters felt they could not ignore it. Phil also wished to devote more time to the 9F, and he resigned rather than go against his professional judgement, but remained on friendly terms. Unfortunately, as far as Rowsley Staion was concerned, he was dead right, and right to resign. The board should have been tougher and more realistic. What actually happened was that once the station was down, there was no money to move it, and a lot of the valuable stone was stolen. What was left was moved to the trackbed at Darley Dale from where more of it was stolen. Ultimately there was just enough of it left to build a toilet block, admittedly a very good one. Professional advice may not be what you want to hear, it may even sometimes be wrong, but you have to understand it thoroughly and know exactly what you are doing before you go against it.
On the other hand, a general stock of useful material against future requirements is often a godsend – if you can store it without it getting in the way. At least the stones were free. The masons’ marks were quite distinctive, and I have occasionally seen porches in the Darley Dale area with stones which looked rather similar. Perhaps they came from the same quarry. But I digress.
Even when rail has been donated the cost of transport must be met, and there were about a hundred tons of material to remove. By the time we had provided for the cost of the tarmac to repair the road and other items we were looking at a total budget of around £1500, at 1087 prices, and any miscalculation or delay would be very expensive. We ended up with a four page checklist covering everything from the additional insurance of £500,000 to the list of tools required; it was a great leap into the unknown.
Gary, Simon and myself were overheard discussing the final arrangements by one of our members who was not in on the secret just before the November 1985 site meeting.
“Sounds like you’re organising a military operation”, he said. I gave him a frosty glare.
“Just so. Briefing for the Company’s officers in the mess at 1600 hours”.
At that meeting we dropped our little bombshell. Final authorisation Had arrived, and the first working party was to go in the next weekend. After the meeting, Pete Lang, an ex-Speke Junction 9F driver dropped his own bombshell. He was working as a tanker driver for Shell at Haydock, he’d heard what we were doing, been to see his boss, and Shell would probably give us their Haydock sidings as well. Two operations running!
The following Friday night was a motorist’s nightmare. I picked up a volunteer called Richard Leckie in Darlington and we crept down the motorways in thick freezing fog. Peter Bradnum had agreed to let his house near Nottingham be used as our forward base, but we were the only ones there, which was not reassuring. In the morning we arrived on site just afterdawn. Through the murk we could hear the distinctive plunk-plunk-clang of steel keys being knocked out. Gary and Simon had spent the night in a van on site and were occupying themselves while they waited for a kettle to boil on a camp stove. We were joined by Les Whittaker, another member who had slept in his vehicle on site – but who hadn’t seen the others in the fog. There were enough tools to keep us occupied as we dismantled the first set of points, but where were the others?
Just before ten Phil Brown’s long suffering lorry arrived with the rest of our tools and a large compressor. It was also covered in snow. The Buxton party had got out just before the roads were shut. We were in the process of unloading when there was a sounding of horns and a cry of “here comes the cavalry!” as a convoy of cars brought in the heavy mob from Sheffield.
After that we really began to make progress. Most of us concentrated on the points while the lorry backed onto the crossing. Shortly after that the compressor was fired up and the crossing disintegrated under a battery of road drills. Another little group unveiled our secret weapon: a compressed air driven wrench with sockets to fit the nuts on the baseplates. It had just been bought by the volunteers sute fund, it was the first time we’d used one, and it worked. Most of the nuts came off in seconds; the gas cutting gear followed up if they did not after a check with an explosimeter confirmed there was no danger of fire.
On the following weekend we brought in a sixty foot trailer and a crane. It took longer to load the turnout components than expected and we only just got away in time, for we had not taken into account the tachograph laws which do not take kindly to extended hours at weekends and the crane took longer than expected to move from the site of one lift to the next. Comparing the equipment to be loaded against the time left in which to do it became a nerve racking race against the clock, but we made it – just!
Meanwhile the air wrench was still busy in the sidings and we went over to the next phase of the operation, which caused us some worry – wrenching the baseplates out of the concrete in which they were set. We had a plan for this but we had never done anything like it before and if it didn’t work we were going to be in trouble. The plates had been unscrewed from the concrete, but not from the rail, which stuck out over the edge of the concrete slab. We inserted our jacks at the end of the rail and began to lift. The rail bent ominously at the first baseplate, but there was no sign of movement. One of our volunteers ran forward holding a sledgehammer aloft and brought it down o the concrete with all his strength and a yell like a Tommy on bayonet practice. There was a slow sucking crunch as the concrete split and the first rail lifted up all along its length, to our enormous relief. After that it was relatively plain sailing as we worked down each rail in turn. The air wrench was then used to unbolt the plates from the rail. Hindsight tells me that a 1” inch drive air wrench would have been much better and faster than the ¾ “ drive we were using – over twice the power – but it did the job in the end. We were working furiously all day and a shattered working party trooped off to Peter Bradnum’s house for supper. Peter had been hauling stones around at Rowsley and was in little better shape.
After a lot of heartsearching I had decided to sell the flatbottom rails. We had no use for them in the immediate future and the transport bills for Nottingham and Haydock would have to be met somehow – I was on a zero budget after all. In those days nearly all preserved railways used bullhead rail, except for the Great Central railway who were not very far away; in fact they were very keen to obtain rail for the proposed loop at Quorn and I sold the rails to them for their scrap value rather than their full market worth. I felt that anything more than covering our costs would be greedy. Come to think of it, the price included delivery to Quorn, so the GCR didn’t do too badly out of it, and they certainly made very good use of the rail. The next weekend saw lorries arrive for the rail, and a buyer for the baseplates. We had discovered a foundry which would offer a better price than the scrap merchants and the plates were a special design, not suitable for use on sleepers. The buyer bought a ten ton skip and was very pleased to see it filled with excellent quality castings. We tried to estimate the weight involved; the driver guessed at nine and a half tons. Martyn Ashworth was sceptical.
“Are you sure”, he asked, as the cable strained at the load. The driver was quite sure, but changed his mind as the front wheels of the lorry rose slowly into the air while the skip stayed put.
There was a very heavy frost when we went for the rail, which enabled us to drive the crane over the grass outside the compound when it would otherwise have bogged down.
In the end we managed to remove the track in four weekends, finishing just in time for the volunteers Christmas party, then went back in the New Year to tarmac the holes we had made in the road.
When we had leisure to consider the matter we realised that we had a difficult decision to take. If we attempted to revise the layout at once then we would probably miss the Easter traffic, but the job had to be done, and the sooner the better. The board agreed and we began to prepare for the work.
The first complication came when a group of members purchased a sleepeing car, and eighty yards of trackbed had to be cleared and a siding laid to accommodate it. Nevertheless by the end of January we had sorted through the rails and timbers for the crossover replacing rotten timbers and broken chairs as we did so.
Second hand timbers have holes in all the wrong places and they have to be plugged to keep out the rain and the rot. Originally we used dowelling cut into four inch lengths – but this is expensive. Quite by chance we discovered that broom handles were the right size at half the price and began to use them instead. I used to buy half a dozen a week and cut them up on my front lawn in Durham, to the mystification of the neighbours.
At about this time, I had a phone call from John Snell, chairman of Peak Rail Operations Ltd. He was impressed by my activities, and asked whether I would like to join the board as Permanent Way Director. I felt didn’t have much more than six months real experience, but John reckoned that was six months more than any other director and I felt the more Buxton volunteers there were on the board the better, so I accepted.
We had laid out the timbers in the car park, and were just about to set a date for cutting into the running line when the weather struck. Closed roads around Buxton featured in the news almost daily and work ground to a standstill for several weeks. Then, just as the snow was thawing we heard from Shell at Haydock. They had considered our request, they would like to donate their sidings, and could we remove them by Easter?
We could and we did. Our volunteers were not in the mood to hang about and a further 600 yards of bullhead track on excellent sleepers was a prize well worth having. We managed to organise a working fortnight at a week’s notice –no mean feat – and the very next weekend a large working party descended like wolves on the fold. By the end of the first day most of the keys had been knocked out and we began to knock out the rails.
Normally this is fairly straightforward, but as we strained at the crowbars the weight seemed exceptionally heavy and the jacks seemed to be sinking into the ballast. Then it dawned on us that because of the hard frost, the rails, sleepers and top six inches of ballast were all coming up in one piece. While the volunteers were scratching their heads and tapping gently on the rails with sledgehammers, the site manager approached.
“Just how do you get the rails out?” he asked.
At that precise moment ”The Tommy” lost his temper, swung his hammer round his head and gave the rail an almighty clout. With a melodious twang three quarters of a ton of rail sprang through the air and landed with a thump. I smiled sweetly at the manager.
“Just like that.”
By the Sunday night all the track had been dismantled and the team for the first week began stacking the components ready for loading with a Manitou loader/tractor; we had learned from our experience and were determined to mechanise wherever possible. We arranged for the transport back to Buxton to begin the following Friday, in an ambitious style.
The plan was that the first lorry would arrive with a spare trailer loaded piggyback, which would be unloaded by the crane. The first trailer was to be swiftly loaded with rail from a prepared stack and sent straight back to Buxton. By the time the second lorry arrived with trailer number three, the second trailer should be loaded, and then we would keep the shuttle going.
It is one thing to plan that sort of operation in abstract, to lead it on the ground for the first time is something else, quite a gamble – but it worked.
For the next week we employed one lorry tractor and three trailers. There was always one trailer being loaded on site, one being unloaded at Buxton and one in transit in between. After three days work, all the rail had gone and we sent the crane away. The sleepers were the worst part of the job. They were coated in thick oil, which we fondly hoped would preserve them , but this made them filthy to handle and they had to be placed in neat stacks on the trailers. 200 sleepers made a full load, to use Martyn’s phrase, it was ‘finger nipping good’. We kept saying “next time we’ll take it out in panels”, but our site crane couldn’t lift a track panel. I might add, I’ve yet to see an industrial track salvage job where the track was good enough to use in a passenger line in panels as it was lifted.
I stayed locally with Pete Lang, who was the PRO operations director and one of Phil Brown’s 9F team. Pete kept an interesting relic, the last known surviving steam age shed cat, which he brought home with him when he left the railway. The cat was as soft as butter, but absolutely enormous. Pete is a fairly large man, but the cat had to spread out lengthways on his chest because it was too big to curl up on his lap. Pete had arranged with Shell that we could use the works canteen, so we could start the day with a full English breakfast and have a hot lunch. Many of us remember the Haydock job as one of the best organised salvage jobs we ever did, and that was due in large part to Pete.
Disaster struck on Wednesday night. We had just finished loading a trailer and were about to disappear in search of beer when we noticed that one of the parking legs at the front of the trailer was leaning at a rather sick angle. Sure enough, when the tractor backed on, the leg refused to be wound up out of the way. It looked as if we might have to unload again to carry out repairs and at that moment I contemplated stamp collecting as a new hobby.
Fortunately we had a spare empty trailer to hand and so the next day we sent it up to Carnforth to collect a water column purchases some time earlier while we gave ourselves furiously to think. When the tractor returned we backed it onto the offending trailer and while it took the weight, we dug down and undermined the defective leg. The ground was frozen solid and I was spitting out stone and ice as I chopped away at the hard standing. Once the leg could be waggled around, we managed to wind it up into its housing and we tied it up with rope to make sure it stayed there. The unloading gang at Buxton were warned to expect it and when it arrived, they immediately built a crib of sleepers underneath it in case it failed altogether.
On the Friday night, Pete Lang and I staggered into a PRO Board meeting in Buxton and announced that the operation was complete. The other directors thanked us, but by then we were askleep in our chairs. Buxton had virtually disappeared under piles of sleepers and there were three loaded trailers waiting for the attention of Martyn Ashworth and his equally shattered unloading crew, but at last we could turn our attention to the real work of railway building.
Finally we were ready. The crossing timbers had been set out in order, plugged and creosoted and numbers. The rails in the running line had been changed for others of scrap quality. An indefinite engineers possession came into effect and the struggle was on.
Our rail crane moved into the platform area and the rails were cut at a convenient place with oxy-propane gear. A short panel of track was craned to one side as a panel complete with sleepers. The ballast in the resulting gap was dug excavated to a little below sleeper bottom level and the turnout components lifted into place, after which the crane retreated thirty feet or so to repeat the process. The first turnout was assembled in one weekend, though it took us four weekends to complete the crossover; we had never built one before and we were s little cautious about modifying valuable turnout components. We were also using a hand operated railsaw. Arthur Dudson, our surveyor, had set out the survey stakes to an accuracy of 1/8 th inch which we were determined to follow.
Once the crossover was finished, the panels of worn track from the old demonstration line were moved sideways onto the line of the run round loop and this left the site of the new running line clear for tracklaying.
The first few lengths of straight track were fairly plain sailing, but then we reached the start of the sharp curve leading to the bridge abutments at the end of the site. This had a radius of 600 feet and as such had to be fitted with a check rail and the gauge widened by ¼ inch to ease the wheels round the curve. That also meant that the check rail had to be set two inches inside the running line instead of the more usual 1 ¾ inches and special check chairs were needed. We managed to obtain a supply of these from a merchant, however when they were delivered, we found that there were two different types; obviously one was wrong and would have to be sent back. We tested the two types with short offcuts of rail and found that the first type produced a correct check gap of two inches. We tested the other one and this also produced a correct gap. Consternation! Eventually we realised that each type held the check rail at a different angle to the vertical so that provided we used the same type throughout each length of rail all would be well.
By this time the sleepers for the curved section had been laid out. The standard chairs were removed from the inside of the sleepers and the holes plugged – more broom handles cut up. By the end of May the curve had been roughly laid out with the outside rail keyed up and we began another working week to complete assembly.
Arthur had accurately set out the centre line of the curve with survey stakes, a small gang with jacks and crowbars set the curve to its final alignment, and we laid out the check chairs ready for the second rail. The next day we had to adjust the alignment again as the contraction of the steel overnight was enough to throw the single rail out of line. The rail joints had to be kept parallel and so each of the rails was shortened by a few inches. With the rail saw this was horribly tedious. Normally at this time we would have drilled the bolt holes by hand, with an ancient contraption which looked like a cross between a bit and brace and a mangle, but I had arranged to borrow a rail drill from the Tanfield Railway as the thought of drilling so many holes was too much to bear.
As the week went by we progressed steadily round the curve. The inside rail was carefully set to 4’ 3 ¾” and bolted down. At least we were able to mechanise this bit with an electric drill and the air wrench.
For the whole week we did nothing but work eat drink and sleep. We were living in unusually comfortable circumstances as our sleeping coach had been delivered from the Dart Valley Railway. It made a welcome change from camp beds round the stove in the site hut. Our evenings were spent in the “Railway Inn” down the road.
By the end of the week the whole of the running line had been laid out and we added the check rail the following weekend; it slipped into the jaws of the check chairs as neat as you please. What remained was the little matter of packing the track to level and spreading something in the order of 200 tons of ballast; in laces the track had to rise by up to a foot to meet the level of the new bridge planned for Bridge Street. For the first time in ourexistence we ran a proper works train. WE had a small Bobcat loader which shovelled heaps of ballast onto flat wagons, which were trundled down the loop by the ex-Manchester Ship Canal diesel to the work site, where the ballast was shovelled off. Once again the lifting jacks were brought out and we took sights over the survey boards to check the level. Slowly the wobbly lines of rail became smooth and true and began to look like a proper railway at last. For once the notorious Buxton weather was fine and the ballasting gang slaved away inn blazing sunshine. This led to even greater thirst and a fund among the volunteers to buy a ballast hopper.
At this time British railways were relaying some of the track in the Buxton Loco Depot at weekends. From time to time some of their platelayers would wander over to see what we were doing and we would compare notes. None of them had ever seen anything like our vintage rail drill! They weerre quite complimentary about the standard of our work, which was most comforting as we were expecting a visit from the Railway Inspectorate who duly came, saw and were satisfied, subject to undertakings to complete certain outstanding works.
By now it was nearly the end of June, and time was running out fast; advertised services would begin in July. The mounds of equipment were cleared out of the car park and the fencing re-instated. The las job of all was to fit a facing point lock to the platform turnout as promised to the inspector.
Now, facing point locks are an essential safety feature on every passenger line; a stretcher bar links the two switches and this has a slot cut in it so that a locking bar can move forward and hold the blades firmly in position and prevent any movement under the train. The slot has to be very precisely cut, and so on the first morning of running trains, our fitter, who had left things rather to the last minute, was crouched in the four foot filing like a man possessed before an interested crowd. At last the wretched thing consented to slide home and I padlocked the locking bar in place. The key was clipped to the train staff which I handed to Pete Lang, who was the rostered driver. The engineer’s possession was over.
We continued our activities through the year, filling every possible corner of the site with track. In twelve months we salvaged 900 yards of track and laid 600 yards, more than in the whole of our previous existence. We began to think we knew something about building railways; other people in influential places began to think we did too. Oh boy did we have a lot to learn!
We chewed the operations over in the pub through the summer and came to the conclusion that if we did a big salvage operation again, it would be less work to take all the chairs off and load the sleepers in packs, which eventually we put into practice.
Privately I had come to some basic conclusions about railway volunteers and directors, which I added to and did my best to put into practice over the years. I won’t say I was perfect all the time, far from it. Read through our later adventures and you can decide how far I succeeded or failed. I won’t say I never had problems with volunteers, but there were none we couldn’t sort out in the end. At the risk of getting my head bitten off, here goes.
Railway volunteers are, by their nature, interested and curious, full of initiative and utterly determined. They do not often bother very much what anyone else thinks: the routine abuse of ”trainspotters” is something they ignore. If they ever stopped complaining I’d be seriously worried, because they wouldn’t care any more. If they were not like that they wouldn’t be active volunteers, and they would not be much use in a tight corner. A good volunteer will probably stay with a railway for a minimum of five years and put in an average of one day per week: a full man year. Call that about £12,000 per head at the national minimum wage, perhaps a lot higher for skilled or heavy labour. A bad manager can easily get rid of a million pounds worth of volunteer labour.
These hard cases can be led, by their consent, but not driven. It is vital that the management keeps the initiative, otherwise the volunteers will start to plan by themselves. They will usually end up with several different plans and start arguing with the management and each other. The comparison I make is that, provided the engine of a car drives the wheels, things go relatively smoothly. If the wheels start driving the engine, the whole thing is likely to go into a skid. If you want a nice quiet, peaceful hobby, this is not it.
Good relations with the volunteers requires a lot of “management by walking about” – go round and talk to the volunteers, find out what they are thinking and pinch ideas off them as you go along. Be flexible; I have no time at all for the “I have said what I have said” school of management. If you ignore an idea and it turns out to be right and you are wrong then you can expect serious trouble, and quite right too. The volunteers need to be assured that their contributions are vital to achieve some essential goal, that they are valued and their efforts will not be wasted.
Confidential information is rather a problem. The cumulative interrogation techniques used by the volunteers, all unconsciously, are simply unholy. They can work out almost as much by what you don’t say as by what you do, and if they work it out for themselves they think everybody knows, so it doesn’t matter any more. There were times when I would have hired the lot of them to MI5. On the whole the best thing was to trust them. As a lawyer nominally leading a railway construction department which contained quite a few professional railwaymen, on whose advice and support I was largely dependent, I did not have a lot of choice about this.
However, trust works both ways. The director in charge of an active volunteering department, if he is any good, will also act as the representative of his volunteers to the board, and if there is a problem then he will have to decide which side he is on. That can lead to a very real conflict; it certainly did in my case, which is why I am no longer a director of Peak Rail plc, but that was all far in the future.
For the time being we all thought we knew where we were going and blundered happily into the unknown.
Tim

 

Dont need to say anything other than =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> \/ \/ \/ \/ \/

Tim are you planning to publish?

 

I have every intention of publishing; however the difference between a series of internet articles and a finished book is, um.....rather like the difference between a steam centre and a railway, and it is going to take a lot of work to get from one to the other. I have been tapping up various friends for photographs, we'll see what comes up.

I gather part 2 has already been used as a training aid on one railway, which is very satisfying as that was one of the reasons these articles were written.

Tim

 

congratulations I will look forward to your book and in the meantime I would recommend that
certain directors in the South read this take note especiall the last few paragraphs and not keep having arguments with volunteers after all we are supposed to be working towards one goal although it would appear that is not the case on what is being said
but there are two sides to everything.
Engineer

 

Top man Tim - as always an excellent read.

 

Great stuff Tim! I was running Peak Rail's London Branch at the time and was very proud to tell anyone who would listen down south about Peak Rail's progress.

Quote, "you don't choose your railway, it chooses you" - never a truer word.

Dave

 

Tim

This is the most well-written, engaging and absobing account of railway preservation that I've had the pleasure of reading. Thank you!

Incidentally, why did Peak Rail leave the Buxton base? It's referred to a few times in several chapters, but unless I've missed one, I wasn't sure! I know that the Buxton site is a rather sad sight today, but was very impressed with Rowsley when I visited a few weeks back.

 

Peak Rail's reasons for leaving Buxton? Several things came together.

The land at Buxton was inaccessible wasteland when we bought it, then they built the inner bypass next door and the mineral water plant was set up, and it became prime commercial real estate. Our solicitor explained we were not interested in money, and the price offered went up and up. Then we wound up with a whacking great hole in our cash flow, as set out in part 3. We were being offered six times as much as we paid for all the land for one third of it.

After that slice was sold we had lost shed, workshop and most of the sidings. We originally planned to build another shed and carry on but around that time HMRI ruled that the signalling in Ashwood Dale was OK for occasional diversions, but not regular timetabled trains. No More DMU charter trips, which we used to do and they did very well. Cheedale Halt had an active life of three months. No prospect of getting that service running into what was left of Buxton site, and a 200 yard running line gets a bit boring after a few years. We didn't fancy building a steam centre to compete with our main operation down the road, and there were lots of other things to do, e.g. Hams Hall.

Then the vandals started to get at what was left so we moved all remaining stock out. Finally, while I was away in 1992-4, more money was needed to deal with trading losses and kick start the Rowsley extension, so we sold a second slice off the joint for even more money, and later a third and final slice, the toe of the embankment, to the Aldi Supermarket. There is enough land theoretically to build a terminus one day. Aldi's retaining wall should be strong enough to hold a Duchess if they built it to the spec I gave them.

I'm afraid the original decision upset a lot of people at the time and I was pretty cut up myself - but there were no realistic alternatives.

Tim