The Light Railways of Britain & Ireland by Burton Anthony; Scott-Morgan John;

Author:Burton, Anthony; Scott-Morgan, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRANSPORTATION / Railroads / History
ISBN: 4392565
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest; Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

The chairman himself, poor man, should certainly have heeded the warning for, after endless trouble with the contractors, numerous mistakes over the laying out of the line and many smaller, but still costly errors, three years went by, and he had sunk almost £100,000 of his own money into the venture with no end in sight. £10 shares were worth less than £3 and the unhappy chairman was declared bankrupt. Poor man, but poor railway too, for the bankruptcy proceedings revealed him as a hopelessly incompetent businessman who had shown as much sense in his handling of railway affairs as he had in managing his own. A man who buys jewellery on credit and then raises cash to pay his debts by immediately pawning it should not perhaps be trusted too far, even if, or the cynical might say especially if, he is the local MP.

The company struggled on without their chairman in rather better style than they had with him, but at the end of it all never succeeded in making the desired connections. At the western end the route left Haughley, staggered through various villages along the way, reached Loxfield, carried on a little further and then stopped: a line to nowhere. It should have been a simple enough line to construct and run, but even the best plans cannot survive a totally incompetent manager, and their first chairman, Mr Stevenson, was just this. The Mid-Suffolk worked out its days as a peaceful line along which the few passengers could travel at gentle pace through a gentle countryside. Perhaps given better handling more could have been made of it. Other lines started off under handicaps as great as those of the Mid-Suffolk and struggled through. Would things have been different if the concern had been in the hands of H.S. Stephens instead of F.S. Stevenson?

We saw something of the Colonel Stephens empire at work in chapter three: in particular the line which stood at the heart of his empire, the Kent and East Sussex Railway. Now we shall turn to one of the more distant outposts, the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. Why this line rather than another? One could say that it showed the Stephens system for reviving lost causes in its most dramatic form, or that it has all the qualities one looks for in a rural line. But it has to be admitted that the true reason is that there was never a line which could boast a more varied and attractive mixture of locomotives. Serious historians will no doubt disapprove of such a frivolous reason, but the railway enthusiast will, I hope, understand. Before we get to the locomotives, however, a little of the history of the line must be inspected – and a remarkable history it turns out to be.

The line began with great aspirations, as companies dreamed of establishing Shrewsbury as a pivotal point from which lines stretched eastward to the manufacturers of the Midlands and west to the Welsh coast.

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