Railways of Telford

David Clarke

• Editore: Crowood
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785000959
• Argomento: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Categoria: Transporte ferroviario

Why did Telford need railways? Shropshire was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution in England, and the railways provided a way of getting raw materials into the works and finished products to market. The network grew steadily with the industries of the time; mining. brick and tile making, iron smelting and forging. Author David Clarke covers the history of the railway network and lines in Telford, from its early industrial beginnings to the present day. The book examines the importance of the coal and engineering industries to the region, and covers the rolling stock, signals, signal boxes and locomotive depots of the network. It details the variety of traffic that was generated in the area and traffic passing through. It also gives details never before published of the workings in and out of Hollinswood Yard. This historical guide to the railway network and lines in Telford from its early industrial beginnings to the present day will be of great interest to local history and railway enthusiasts. Illustrated with 200 period and archive black & white illustrations, some never before published.

CHAPTER 1

The Industrial Revolution in East Shropshire

The Area Before the Industrial Revolution

Before one can consider the railways in the Telford area we need to look at why the area required such an extensive railway system. East Shropshire had extensive coal reserves and outcrops of coal were known to have been worked by the Romans at Oakengates. Coal mining continued through the Middle Ages. The mines of this period were relatively small, with the shafts only being about 60–100ft (20–30m) deep, and this type of mining continued into the twentieth century. An unfortunate consequence of this was that subsidence became a chronic feature of the area. Many of these small pits were not documented and many had quite short working lives. The mining for coal also revealed deposits of ironstone and fireclay, enabling iron smelting to be undertaken. A blast furnace was known to have been opened in Lilleshall village in 1591.

The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire

There is some debate amongst historians regarding the period of time that should be considered as the Industrial Revolution. The consensus view is that the date range is from around 1760 to 1830, which was then followed by a second Industrial Revolution between 1870 and 1890. The Industrial Revolution can be considered one of the major turning points in human history, impacting on every aspect of life. It was characterized by an increase in average incomes and economic growth. The area known as Telford was to play a major part in this world-changing process.

One of the key elements of the Industrial Revolution was the transition from using charcoal to coal for the production of iron and steel, which resulted in the cost of producing iron being significantly reduced. For a given amount of heat, coal required much less labour to mine than cutting wood and converting it to charcoal, plus coal was available in much greater quantities.

The use of coal for smelting iron actually started in 1678 with the reverberatory, or air furnace, but this was an inefficient process and was not widely adopted. In 1708, Abraham Darby at his furnaces at Coalbrookdale developed a technique using coke to fuel his blast furnaces, which enabled him to reduce the cost of producing pig iron. By the mid-1780s, Abraham Darby II was building new furnaces at Horsehay and Ketley, such that coke pig iron was now cheaper than charcoal pig iron and could for the first time be considered a structural material. This was given a huge boost by the building of the Iron Bridge over the River Severn by Abraham Darby III in 1778.

The supply of cheaper iron and steel impacted on other industries, such as nail-making, chain-making, hinges, wire and other hardware items, as well as to the growing machinery and engine industries. One quarter of the iron produced in Britain in 1806 came from East Shropshire.

The Coalbrookdale Company built blast furnaces at Donnington Wood in 1783. The discovery of fireclay also enabled brickworks to be opened where tiles, white bricks, firebricks and land drainage pipes would be made. The brickworks at Wrockwardine Wood and Donnington Wood were originally based at small mines where fireclay was produced as a by-product of coal mining before the brickworks was expanded in 1793.

Such was the passion for cast iron that John Wilkinson, an ironmaster, promoted the use of iron for all sorts of products, including kerb edges, and he developed the small iron boats (known as tub boats) that were used in the canals and which could be pulled up the inclined planes. Parallel with the improved quality of the iron produced he invented the first precision boring tool for the manufacture of cannon for the navy.

The great iron steamship, the SS Great Britain, built in 1843 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was constructed of wrought iron plates supplied from the Coalbrookdale area of Shropshire, with the plates arriving at Bristol by barge on the River Severn. It is thought that some of the workmen employed on building the SS Great Britain came from the Shropshire ironworking district, as they had experience of making small canal boats in iron and the riveting techniques required.

One of the key features of the Shropshire ironmasters was the existence of companies combining ironworking with mineral extraction and then integrating this with the ironworks, including blast furnaces, forges and rolling mills, as well as in some cases foundries and engineering shops.

The Coming of the Railways

With the growth of mining, brick-, tile- and ironmaking and the production of many iron products, the big problem was getting the raw materials into the various works and then the finished products away to market. Originally, the location of Abraham Darby’s works in Coalbrookdale was a combination of local supplies of wood for charcoal and local ironstone, then subsequently local supplies of coal. The adjacent River Severn enabled the finished goods to be taken downriver to Worcester, Gloucester and Bristol and upstream to Shrewsbury. However, the river was not the most reliable of transport systems, with inconsistent water depth causing problems during the summer months, leading to reductions in the loads carried by the boats. One other unusual disruptive factor reported in 1734 was the appearance of a British warship at Bristol Docks, which resulted in many of the bargemen and crews of the river boats avoiding the area because of fear of being ‘press-ganged’ into the Navy! In 1756, over 100,000 tons of coal was shipped from the collieries in Broseley and Madeley.

Whilst the River Severn provided the only means of transporting coal and goods out of the area, there was also the problem of getting raw materials into the ironworks (and also moving coal from the mines into the river boats). The only means of achieving this was by teams of packhorses. The solution to this problem was twofold – the development of canals and the creation of tramways, which consisted of wooden rails laid down on a roadway and the coal and iron carried along them in 50cwt wagons with iron wheels.

Several canals were built in the area and these incorporated a number of inclined planes to cater for the hilly countryside. The first canal was the Donnington Wood Canal, which opened in June 1767 and served the Lilleshall Company. Other canals followed in 1788, 1797 and finally in 1832. There were five tunnels and seven inclined planes linking the canals together, highlighting the difficulty of building canals in a hilly area. To get the raw materials to the canals, a system of tramways soon developed and these gradually got longer and longer, with one of the tramways being 8 miles (13km) in length. Some of the difficulties with the canals in the heavily mined areas were subsidence causing leakage from the canals and the inclined planes being expensive to operate.

The first recorded use of a wooden railway in the area was in 1605, when a line was built from Jackfield down to the River Severn for moving coal from the mines down to the ships on the river. Abraham Darby II built such a tramway in the 1750s based on the plateways used in the north-east of England, but with many improvements such as the use of cast wheels and iron axles.

Soon the area became covered in these early tramways transporting not only coal, ironstone and limestone, but also clay and fireclay into the tile- and brickworks. The tramways were further developed in 1767 when the Coalbrookdale Company produced the first cast-iron rails for the plateways and by 1785 there were over 20 miles (32km) of iron plateways. The use of iron rails was a considerable improvement over wooden rails, as they were less likely to wear out or collapse and also enabled larger wagons to be used. The motive power for these tramways was horses for the longer distances and manpower for short distances, although oxen were used on road wagons and it is assumed they may also have been used on the plateways. The limit now on the plateways was the use of horses to pull the trains of wagons. Abraham Darby also made the obvious move by opening new furnaces at Horsehay and Ketley (in 1755), which had coal mines immediately adjacent to the ironworks, reducing the amount that needed to be transported by the plateways.

Before the proper railways appeared, the Coalbrookdale area was covered in plateways pulled by horses. Here some of the surviving plateway wagons and track are seen near the Coalbrookdale Company works.

The area was soon covered in plateways and even after the coming of the canals and the standard-gauge railways, plateways continued in use for many years, with the last horse-drawn plateway between Lightmoor Brick and Tileworks and the foundry at Coalbrookdale, which did not close until October 1932.

The coal-mining bonanza in East Shropshire led to a blitzed landscape and it has been estimated that over 6,000 mine shafts were sunk in the East Shropshire coalfield. Coal production peaked in Shropshire in 1871, when 1 million tons were produced. From that date onwards, production gradually declined. As an example of the decline of coal mining, the Lilleshall Company had fifteen coal mines in 1891, but this had reduced to five mines in 1915 and by 1947 had further reduced to two.

The twentieth century is a story of decline and finally the ending of underground mining in this coalfield. Many pits closed through exhaustion of reserves, but economics also played its part. A combination of the great depression, losses incurred during miners’ strikes (particularly the 1921 and 1926 strikes), manpower shortages and increased competition from the Staffordshire Coalfields led to a series of pit closures. Ironstone production ceased completely in the early part of the twentieth century, but clay mining remained active in the southern part of the coalfield. The last fireclay mine, The Rock, which actually lies in the northern part of the coalfield, closed in 1964.

At Nationalization of the coal industry, there were three principal deep mines remaining open – Granville and Grange Collieries of the Lilleshall Company and Kemberton Colliery of the Madeley Wood Company. A few small private pits also operated. Most of the small mines were soon closed, but small private drift mining did not finish until Shortwoods Mine, near Wellington, closed in 1971. Under reconstruction, Granville and Grange Collieries merged into a single unit in 1952. After this date, the Grange shafts were used solely for ventilation purposes. Kemberton Colliery finally closed in 1967 through exhaustion and, with the closure of Granville Colliery in 1979 through heavy faulting, underground coal mining ended in Shropshire.

Similarly, the production of iron from furnaces peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1862, there were seven different companies owning thirty-two blast furnaces in the area, but this had fallen to fourteen furnaces by 1878, producing 100,000 tons of pig iron – about half of what had been produced in 1868. The reality for the railway companies was that soon after they had arrived in East Shropshire many of the industries they served were in slow decline, although these industries would still generate profitable traffic for them until the 1950s.

What is also clear from looking at the competing railway lines in the area was how the local companies took advantage of the fierce competition between the railway companies, with many sites being served by two rival companies, so the Lilleshall Company had access to the LNWR from the Coalport branch and also at Donnington, as well as the Great Western at Hollinswood. Randlay Brickworks had access via the LNWR Coalport branch at one side of its works and from the Great Western at the other (Stirchley or Old Park branch), so could decide which carrier to use based on price and service. A similar situation occurred at Haybridge Iron Company, which had sidings on both the LNWR and GW lines.

The coming of the standard gauge main-line railways to East Shropshire was dependent upon the opening of railways elsewhere. In 1837, The Grand Junction Railway (GJR) linked Birmingham (via Wolverhampton) and Stafford to Liverpool and Manchester. In 1848, the Shrewsbury and Chester opened the line between those two locations, so the railways were getting closer, but needed further construction to take place.

The Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway and the Shropshire Union Railway and Canal Company (usually abbreviated to Shropshire Union or SU) had been given authorization to proceed with their plans, so the two companies shared the construction of the railway between Shrewsbury and Wellington. They also shared the operation of the lines. The railway opened from Shrewsbury as far as Wellington in June 1849, with the route to Wolverhampton being opened in November 1849.

In parallel to this, the Shropshire Union was constructing the line from Stafford to Wellington, which also opened in June 1849, but the company was now leased to the LNWR. This period was one of consolidation and the Shrewsbury and Birmingham became part of the Great Western Railway in September 1854.

In 1867, the line from Crewe via Market Drayton opened with a junction on the Shrewsbury side of the goods yard, which was controlled by Wellington no.4 signal box. The line was absorbed by the Great Western in 1877, giving the GWR a through route to Crewe and Manchester.

So by the 1870s, East Shropshire was connected to the wider national rail network and had direct links to the Black Country and London, as well as Crewe and Shrewsbury. The branch lines to Coalport and Buildwas meant that the heavily industrialized region now known as Telford was well served and raw materials could be brought in and finished goods flow out.

0-6-2 tank 5690 is seen at Wellington no.4 signal box in July 1959 with a northbound freight. Diverging to the right is the line to Market Drayton and Crewe, with the main line to Shrewsbury straight ahead. M. MENSING

CHAPTER 2

Wellington and the Main Line

Wellington

As the principal station of the area and certainly the busiest, it seems appropriate to start our journey around the railways of Telford at Wellington. There are still a number of trains working through the station, despite the closure of several of the lines that once fed into the station. From an architectural point of view, it is very much the same station that emerged from the rebuilding in 1888.

Wellington is the largest town in the district and has a long history. It was given the right to hold a market in the town in 1244 and continues to be a market town to this day. As such, much of its wealth has derived from agriculture, with a large cattle market and a potato market, as well as maltings and breweries (there were two in the town, Wrekin Ales and Shropshire Breweries). The industries in the town were also agricultural-based, with foundries catering for agricultural equipment. There was also a church and school furniture manufacture...