Photo by Giles Favell

Great Dorset Adventure…..

It all started with a phone call from my brother Aidan (these things usually do…). It had been brought to his attention that a miniature railway was wanted to join the Great Dorset Road Builders at this years Steam Fair, to be incorporated into their operations and make life even more interesting! Aidan’s first impulse was to take the 7 ¼” portable railway (with which he regularly does a large variety of events) as being a known quantity that fits neatly into one (well) packed trailer. The idea of doing an intensive 5 day event – far away from any workshops – with ‘Cutie’ and Aidan’s recently acquired ‘Midge’ - both with a firebox the size of a beer mat – I felt to be extremely hard work and very trying. I then proceeded to shoot myself in the foot, by suggesting that if it was going to happen at all, it would be best done with 10 ¼” instead! My logic being that the loco would have to be steaming for 9 hours a day, solidly for 5 days, would need to be reliable, and very importantly, needed to be quite powerful to deal with whatever circumstances were thrown at us…..sounded like ‘Alice’ to me. We could also take the Hymek as a standby / insurance – ideal.
Aidan, of course, agreed that this would be much better, but could it be practically achieved? (Since the track didn’t exist, the coach was in Guildford, and it would obviously necessitate the use of two large trailers get the kit there…). Of course we could, I blithely stated, Di and I needed some track in Greenford anyway (a good excuse to buy it), and not only that, perhaps I could make up a couple of wagons to add to the atmosphere! I really should know better….

After making enquiries, I managed to source some track from Peter Bower at the Royal Victoria Railway, who had bought a complete railway just in order to acquire a very beautiful Western (one of Curwen’s originals) which came with the package. A deal was struck for 150 feet of track, and four wheel-sets which were to be used for those wagons I volunteered to build, all of which I picked up in June or July. The track proved to be even better that I was expecting – as it was already made up into 12 foot panels – the ideal length for the job we had in mind, had steel sleepers, and was 14lb per foot rail! The only down side was that half of it was curved. Peter very kindly lent me his rail rolls, as mine weren’t big enough for this section, and I spent a knackering two days stripping the curves, straightening them, trimming and re-building them into the straight panels that we needed. How anyone can use rail rolls for more than five minutes without wanting to motorise them beats me!
In the middle of all this, a request came through from Pete Craddock (Great Dorset Road Builders) asking if it would be possible to have a point as well….A couple of years ago I had had a happy time building a point for Pulborough, and didn’t really want to do it again, however, I needed one anyway for Greenford, and the cheapest I could buy an appropriate one was about £500 – a very reasonable price, but more money than I could justify spending (on top of everything else). I therefore bought a pile of surplus 3 lb per foot rail from Pulborough, which would not only do the 7 ¼” track in the garden, but I could build the required point from it as well, having got powered rolls to bend it with.
I then spent a very hectic couple of weeks building up the track panels, building a point, and building two tipper wagons – which carrying about a third of a ton each, have proved very successful – being easily tipped, not tipping at all by accident, and staying on the track throughout the whole proceedings! Being well aware of the delicacy of the tipping geometry (pivot too low and the whole thing falls over – too high and you can’t tip it etc.) I spent some time leafing through all my books for photos and information on tippers. I found lots of photos, but there was nothing very helpful, and eventually I took as risk and scaled up one of the old Triang Big Big Train (O Gauge) tippers from the 60’s. Works very well. Aidan then very kindly volunteered Nick Kingshott into cropping the steel sheet to size and putting the radius bend in to form the ‘V’, after which Aidan welded the end plates to the ‘V’ and delivered them to Greenford!
Chris Knibbs, a friend of ours who is Operations Manager at the Bluebell Railway, very kindly came and spent a hard day at Greenford drilling for fishplates and making up panels of light-weight track for the siding, and then we were ready for loading the one ton of track onto the trailer that Mick Blackburn (another Bluebell friend) very kindly lent us. We arrived at the Great Dorset on Saturday (opening on Wednesday), whereupon Pete Craddock, the boss of the Road Builders section, showed us the proposed site – indeed the only site available.

What the people with tractors and traction engines call flat isn’t quite the same as railway folk..........
In fairness, this was no real surprise, and Di and I had arrived armed with laser level, poles etc, for just this eventuality. A quick survey showed that we had a fall of at least 5 foot over a distance of about 150 feet! Although we knew ‘Alice’ could cope with this, the idea of starting and (much more importantly) stopping on a gradient of 1 in 30 was really not an acceptable proposition. In conference with Pete, we then whistled up a JCB (they have lots of useful kit there) and asked the driver to dig us a cutting, 30 or 40 foot long, to about 2’6” deep. The plan was to use the spoil to then build an embankment at the other end, to at least give us both ends flat!
The JCB driver slightly misunderstood me, and proceeded to dig a five foot deep trench, and was making remarkable progress before we spotted it and got him to fill it up again….. However by the end of a fairly hard (and stressful) day, we actually had the entire track down, apart from the final panel and the siding panels – albeit un-ballasted. We all then took Sunday off to go to Evesham for my Fathers’ 80th birthday celebrations (we coincidentally happened to find ourselves at Evesham Vale admiring Steve Bells beautiful new loco – ‘St. Egwin’, built by Exmoor).
Monday dawned, and found us with the delivery of ballast that we had been waiting for, and Chris spent a happy day saying silly things like “up half an inch”, “down a gnats…” etc... For heavens sake, narrow gauge is supposed to be a bit irregular –it’s called character. Instead we found ourselves with a formation which would do credit to the cross channel rail link….
It turned out that where as I had anticipated simply putting down the track and running trains, Pete, the team boss, actually wanted to create a railway in the fullest sense, and had come armed with a lovely station sign – ‘Tanglefoot Halt’, gates which had been built by Aidan on a previous visit, and fencing, which then had to be painted white! All this, with a platform that we lovingly built into the bank, created a surprisingly charming little station. Indeed, we were to find that the railway very quickly developed a reality of its own – which made it all the harder to eventually rip up and remove.

Photo by Roy Harwood

It was actually rather fun to be part of the fair instead of simply visiting it, and we were surprised at how much there was happening before the public ever got in (I’m convinced some of the best bargains were to be had before it opened). The beer tent was obviously one of the very first amenities open, together with a good number of food stalls. It was very much like a small (and very interesting) town growing in front of you!

Photo by Roy Harwood

I don’t do camping.
As a child all our holidays were spent in tents, and my memories are of being damp and cold, the air-bed going down half way through the night, and having to get hurriedly dressed into damp clothes in a tent that you couldn’t kneel up in without touching the side and creating a little river of water on the inside. And the loos were half a mile away, and quite revolting when you got there.......

Di and I camped at the Great Dorset. This was not in an effort to purge one’s childhood memories, or out of any romanticism. This was an act of extreme desperation. All the bed and breakfasts within 20 miles are booked up at least a year in advance! However, tents and air-beds have significantly improved in the last thirty years, and the activity is not quite as traumatic as it used to be. Apart from the toilets. These are every bit as bad as ones’ imagination could make them!

The actual running of the railway was throughout, trouble free. We ran a passenger service on demand (which was pretty constant) interspersed with the occasional stone runs with the tippers. Operating any railway constantly is boring and tedious – and so we were helped enormously by Chris Knibbs, Henry, Roy and Chris Harwood, all of whom drove, cleaned prepared etc., and enabled Aidan, Nikki, Katie, Di and myself to have some time off to go and enjoy the fair (and in Aidan’s case, go off and commentate on events happening elsewhere in the Road Builders section!).

It was very satisfying that we actually had exactly the right kit for the job. Leaving aside any personal prejudice for or against narrow gauge, it actually is much more functional for a job of work than ‘scale’ locos (by which we mean standard gauge outline), as its inherent design is much more appropriate with small wheels, larger bits and pieces etc...
Anyway, she coped very well indeed, the only problem being with dirty water from a lagoon fouling her injector one afternoon. The coach, whilst not being conventional, is ideal for cramming lots of passengers on whilst only taking up 12 foot of track, and finally, the rail being as heavy as it is, is much more rigid and stable, allowing the use of many fewer sleepers, and a lot less jacking and packing than we were used to.

On the Monday after the fair, we –almost sadly- unbolted the panels, and loaded them onto one trailer, while the two locos and coach went onto the other, and we all went our separate ways. The track went to Greenford, where it has already been laid and is awaiting its christening by a visit from ‘Alice’, and the locos back to Pulborough where they resumed their normal life.

This Great Dorset Railway was not a ‘temporary track’ over which a visiting loco runs, but ended up a properly engineered little railway with its own charming character that was only there for a week. We hope to do the same again in future years, but we are loath to rip up the railway in Greenford to provide track, so we have bought some more specifically for use at the Great Dorset (and possibly elsewhere?).
I would not say that a 10 ¼” gauge railway is an easy size to tour – this took two large trailers with attendant Range-rover and Day van, and took a while to lay / build, but certainly, we consider it very well worth the trouble and effort for a show of this size. The 7 ¼” we have is the only solution to the weekend Church fetes etc., but it would not in any way have been a viable alternative for the arduous and demanding situation that we found ourselves in! Our thanks (from both our families) very much go to the afor-mentioned Roy and Chris, Henry, and especially Chris K, all of whom made it a fun experience, and not the potential hell such things can turn into. It was also great to make new friends in the Road Builders (Di got to drive a steam roller and a diesel roller) especially Pete and Val Craddock.

(Orders are now being taken for the construction of very nice tipper wagons….)

Photo by Roy Harwood