The Railway from Buxton to Bakewell, Matlock & Ambergate – the title of a book by JM Bentley which I picked up from the library sale trolley for the bargain price of 40p.
It is a book of photographs, the majority of them of interest mainly to railway experts & enthusiasts, but still plenty for me to wallow in nostalgically.
Buxton Midland Station in 1902 – busy with Edwardian ladies & gentlemen, children, a well-stocked book stall, milk churns, advertising signs & cloakrooms. The world in which my great grandfather was a wheelwright, but also the kind of stultifying society which the young Vera Brittain was later to be so eager to escape.
1928 Ramsay MacDonald being welcomed to the same station by local dignitaries & eager crowds, shortly before he became prime minister again.
1962 A steam engine pulling a single carriage out of the station on its way to Millers Dale – an emergency stand-in for a broken down diesel unit at a time when such failures were not unusual. In older days this would have been a push & pull locomotive, but by then few such were available, so the engine had to run around the single coach at each end of the journey. The last train of any kind ran on this line in 1968.
Matlock station 1952, showing the very large - & busy – goods yard used by the limestone industry.
Matlock station July 1961, around about 3.30 in the afternoon, minutes before the arrival of two express passenger trains – one (with restaurant car service) on its way to London St Pancras from Manchester & the other making the return journey. A service which came to an end in 1968, leaving this part of the country without any intercity connections at all.
I also learned from this book that the old story that Buxton had no through-train services because of a sense of self-importance – people come to Buxton, they do not merely pass through – is not true.
Animosity between the C19th railway pioneers - especially the Midland & the London & North Western companies – plus the difficulty of finding routes through such hilly terrain – led ultimately to a real lack of strategic planning & duplicated capital expenditure which could have been avoided with better relations & a modicum of cooperation. Sir Edward Watkin was involved in these shenanigans.
And they had C19th environmentalists to cope with too. The proposed Monsal Dale viaduct caused tremendous controversy. It is now a listed structure of historic importance , owned by the National Park, used as a trail by walkers.
As a correspondent to The Times recently pointed out, taken collectively, no overall profit has ever been made year by year by the railways in this country, whether operating under Victorian capitalist competition, nationalisation, Beeching reorganisation or privatisation.
And yet where would our economy be without them?
