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    Rails through Barnsley: A Photographic Journey
    Rails through Barnsley: A Photographic Journey
    Rails through Barnsley: A Photographic Journey
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    Rails through Barnsley: A Photographic Journey

    By Alan Whitehouse

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    About this ebook

    Few people realise it, but Barnsley was once the centre of a railway universe. In Victorian times, dozens of competing companies put forward schemes to build railways across, through and around the town. Between them they constructed what some still regard as the most dense railway network in the country more complicated even than Londons commuter system or even the railway networks of our major cities. The reason almost no one knows about it is because many of the lines built never saw a passenger service. They were built for one reason: coal. A maze of semi-unknown branches served every colliery in the district and the network became so overloaded with coal trains that they even had to build a railway bypass around the town to prevent everything grinding to a standstill!Down the years Barnsleys railway network became something of a backwater, ignored by many enthusiasts and photographers. So the full story of how the railways aided the towns prosperity has rarely been told. This book is an attempt to put that right by giving a relatively short but fact-packed history, looking at each of the railway companies that opened up the town and connecting it with what was going on in the outside world. It includes a collection of high quality images, many of which have not been seen before.As the coal industry rose and fell, so did the railway system which served it, and this book will show exactly how it all happened and why.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 30, 2016
    ISBN9781473892736
    Rails through Barnsley: A Photographic Journey

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      Book preview

      Rails through Barnsley - Alan Whitehouse

      INTRODUCTION

      BEGINNINGS

      Most people today never handle coal at all. Those who do probably see, or touch it, only occasionally. From being an everyday commodity only a couple of generations ago, coal is now a rarity in most people’s lives. But anyone who has ever lifted a sack of the stuff knows what a heavy and awkward product it is. A significant coal industry could never develop unless a cheap and efficient way could be found of transporting it, in bulk, from the pit to the customer. This simple fact is the key to the rise – and fall – of Barnsley’s railway network.

      The first way of moving bulk coal was by water. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, three canals penetrated the Barnsley area, running to basins at Cawthorne, Elsecar and Worsborough, as well as Barnsley itself. But they were only a partial answer to the problem of getting coal to where it was needed: the developing mills, factories and furnaces. The hilly countryside around Barnsley made it hard to plot the course of a waterway.

      An early drawing of Edmunds Main Colliery in Worsborough Dale. A short wagonway took coal to the Worsborough Branch of the Dearne and Dove Canal.

      The statue of Joseph Locke, railway engineer and one of Barnsley’s most famous sons. The statue is in Locke Park, Barnsley.

      The answer was to cross the land itself, but on rails rather than the rutted, waterlogged and inadequate roads that existed at the time. The idea of putting things on rails was not a new one even then. It is impossible to say what the first railway was or precisely when it was built, because early tramways developed out of very primitive beginnings, using crude wooden rails and wheels, sometime just to cross a few yards of difficult ground. Initially, tramways were used to link collieries with nearby canals. The well-known illustration of Edmunds Main Colliery at Worsborough is a good example.

      But gradually, tramways took on a new identity as small transport systems in their own right, and no fewer than three horse-drawn tramways emerged around Barnsley. The Silkstone Tramway, perhaps the best known, ran on 4-foot gauge tracks from Silkstone Common, taking coal down to Cawthorne Basin where it was loaded onto canal barges. The first section opened in 1810 and lasted fifty years before being abandoned as the mines it served were worked out.

      Stone block sleepers on the route of the Silkstone Tramway. These early railways used short lengths of cast iron rail supported on the stone blocks. Wooden sleepers and steel rails – which could be made in much longer lengths – came later.

      Just over ten years later, the Worsborough Tramway opened, again linking coal and ironstone mines around Rockley and Pilley with the Dearne and Dove Canal basin at Worsborough Bridge. This was a more ambitious system, several miles in length, which divided at Rockley into two main routes, using a 4’ 3" gauge. Another ‘first’ was a short tunnel at Rockley, which can still be seen today. This system had a surprisingly long life, finally being abandoned in about 1920. Over forty years later, when the M1 motorway was driven across the former line of route, a store of wooden wagon wheels and other artefacts were uncovered.

      The third route, the Elsecar and Thorncliffe Tramway, left another branch of the Dearne and Dove Canal at Elsecar and ran to Milton, serving an ironworks, at Hoyland and on to Thorncliffe, near Chapeltown, to a second ironworks. A number of coal mines were included in the scheme. This used what was high technology at the time, with stationary steam engines hauling sets of wagons up one of the gradients. It opened in 1830 and part of it was closed fifty years later in 1880. However, another section survived and was rebuilt as a standard gauge railway, which was used as a colliery branch line until just before the First World War.

      These developments combined to make this area of South Yorkshire one of the most industrially advanced in the country and, compared with roads and canals, it allowed the rapid transport of coal in significant quantities. But, impressive as they were, these tramways did no more than set the stage for the next phase: the development of one of the most dense railway networks in Great Britain. A system that had Barnsley at its heart and which was driven almost entirely by King Coal.

      CHAPTER ONE

      BARNSLEY... OR NOT?

      If you were the adventurous sort and decided that this new-fangled rail travel was for you, then back in those early days, your rail journey from Barnsley began not with a steam locomotive, but with a horse bus. Any luckless travellers who came to the town only found out when they stepped onto the platform, that the station marked ‘Barnsley’ on their map was in fact at Cudworth: three miles from the town itself. The horse bus provided that vital link.

      This was far from unusual in the early days of railways. Locomotives were primitive and, relatively speaking, underpowered. The most famous of all railway builders, George Stephenson, insisted that his lines should have no gradient steeper than 1 in 100. The North Midland Railway, which laid those first tracks through Cudworth, was started in 1836 with the aim of linking Derby and Leeds. It gives an idea of how inflexible Stephenson was that he not only refused to build his railway through Barnsley, but even bypassed Sheffield as well, because of the engineering work that would have been needed to keep the route relatively flat.

      Cudworth station on a September day in 1966. The locomotive is an 8F Class, 48641, and it comes with an interesting history. Although designed by William Stanier for the London Midland and Scottish Railway, it was actually built at the Southern Railway workshops in Brighton in 1943 as part of the war effort. It was withdrawn from service three months later. The station itself is deserted because by this time local passenger services had been axed. Steve Armitage Collection

      But fourteen years earlier Cudworth was a hive of activity as enthusiasts turned out in their scores to see a railtour hauled by two veterans: on the left a Class D20 locomotive, 62360, built by the North Eastern Railway, and on the right 40726, another 4-4-0 passenger engine, but this time built by the Midland Railway. J W Armstrong/ARPT Collection

      The railway opened for business in 1840 and within three years, Cudworth was the scene of an accident when a train running several hours late smashed into the rear of another passenger train standing in the station. One passenger was killed and many more were injured. An inquiry found the driver to be inexperienced. He was an employee of George Hudson, the so-called ‘railway king’, who had bought out the North Midland Railway and then sacked the regular drivers who had objected to him cutting their wages.

      The station was renamed Cudworth in 1854 after two other companies had built lines into Barnsley itself. The Leeds and Manchester Railway opened a route from Wakefield through Haigh and Darton, which ran to Exchange Station making an end-on junction with the South Yorkshire Railway’s new line from Doncaster and Mexborough.

      Cudworth then became just another station along what had become the Midland Railway’s main route from London to Derby, Sheffield, Leeds and Carlisle. And, although a diversion route was built into Sheffield, Barnsley never quite made it onto the main line, having to be content instead with a

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