Memoirs of a Railway Volunteer - Part 3

Early Years At Darley Dale. Part I.

There are a few essential rules for running any company, which are difficult to learn and stick to in a voluntary organisation. First, you have to be clear about the difference between working, managing and directing. Working is being down a hole digging. Managing is running a team of diggers. You spend some of the time digging and a lot of time climbing in and out of the hole to make sure the muck is being carted away and the diggers have what they need. Directors sit a long way back, look at what is coming out of the various holes and plan where the next one should be.

In a railway preservation company, the problem is that the volunteers have to be led, and they soon start complaining if the directors are not on site with them. Proper directing is a lot harder than it looks and takes a lot of time. Non-executive directors are particularly valuable. Executives execute - they do things and have specific responsibilities, e.g. Mechanical Engineering Director. Non - executive directors should be tough and intelligent people with wide experience. Their function is to think hard and deeply and ask nasty questions. Why is the company going in this direction? What is the evidence for your basic assumption? Getting a full team of volunteer directors with the necessary skills is not easy. Knowing the volunteers and their individual capabilities is an essential part of the job for both managers and directors.

Secondly, the executive and financial authority must be separated and keep a check on each other. If they combine and the other directors do not have a clear view of what is happening, then all sorts of things can go wrong, budget distortion, waste and even fraud. One of the larger railways had a very able chief executive, very much in the public eye, and even after an experienced banker joined the board, it took a long time before they realised he’d been exploiting their finances for years. All it takes is one strong character, running out of control.

Appointment to a management job on a preserved railway, unpaid or not, should be like any other even if it is done informally, by advertisement, interview and references, which should be taken up. Performance must be reviewed. This is the point in railway preservation where friendship and business do not mix. There are too many problem cases who apparently wander from one railway to another leaving mayhem in their wake every time. I know of one railway which got a reference which went something like “he will be very valuable as long as he agrees with you”. They made no further enquiry and appointed him. Soon afterwards a disastrous falling out split that railway from top to bottom, which is just what had happened at the last one.

Finally, Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is king. Your company may show a lot of activity, the accountants may even declare a profit, but is there cash to pay the bills and do you have a reserve for future maintenance. Whether you are a finance director or not, you should see regular management accounts and budgets.

This story is partly about how these rules were not kept, and what followed. It is a strictly personal view and 10/10 hindsight. I am not sure how we could have done any better with the experience and resources at our disposal. Railway preservation can be a brutal business. The work is so demanding that you will get to know the people you work with very well, and that comradeship is part of the attraction. This may stay your hand when really you should be making searching enquiries and challenging perceived wisdom.

I have been on quite a few first days on site with the Peak Railway, at Buxton, Darley Dale Station, Darley South Yard and Matlock Goods Shed. I was also on the last day at Buxton.

Peak Rail spent the early to mid 1980’s building up its site at Buxton, basically because there was nowhere else on the line it could get a serious foothold. At the beginning of that decade, trees grew thickly on Rowsley site, which had no road access, and the trackbed at Darley Dale was earmarked for a new highway, or alternatively industrial development. Tarmac wanted to use the river bridge at Matlock, Bridge 35 today, for road access to Cawdor Quarry and fought hard against the railway. One local authority openly referred to the Peak Railway and its backers as “men of straw”.

Up at Buxton, there was another battle over the plans for the inner relief road and Ross Hill managed to achieve an alignment which left space for a possible station on part of the old Midland site. In those days railway preservation schemes usually lost such battles, so even a partial win was quite a victory. Pending the final arrangement we leased the site and began work. Progress in the first few years was slow, disorganised and undercapitalised, but we learned a lot in the process and built up quite a substantial engineering base in the old goods shed, which we patched up as best we could. A lot of the site was cleared of rubble with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows because we simply did not know any better. We took the opportunity to buy the site at a time when land was relatively cheap, I think for £50,000, which seemed an enormous amount at the time. You could buy quite a nice house for £20,000 then.

John Snell won an important victory at a local enquiry to preserve the trackbed of the railway at Darley Dale for the future, otherwise it would have been built on. In about 1983 a lease was taken on the small Up platform building, which I am told had been last used as an Orthodox Chapel. It was in quite a bad state and a small team including Peter Bradnam, Mike Griggs and Max Harris beavered away for years with very small resources. I believe one of the doors was repaired with an identical one from Bakewell, which was derelict at that time.

From about 1985 onwards, the Buxton Midland site began to look much more developed and professional, thanks in large part to the efforts of Martyn Ashworth who ran the Manpower Services Commission Scheme and attracted quite a lot of locomotives and stock to the site, which became very crowded. I had a hand in matters myself and was appointed to the board of Peak Rail Operations Ltd in 1985, I suspect it was to keep me and my salvage activities under some sort of control. The results were good enough to impress Derbyshire Dales District Council and by the Spring of 1987 it began to seem that they would give us a licence to occupy the goods yard at Darley Dale and start work.

Here was a fantastic opportunity to use all the hard lessons we had learned at Buxton on a green field site. I remember forcing my way through the trees and coming upon a large patch of tarmac (still there to this day). This, I thought, this will be the ballast dump, with the P.Way stores next to it. Granted that the place was heavily overgrown, it seemed very big compared with Buxton. Our neighbours included a coal yard, a sawmill, a second hand dealer in contractors plant, the council highways yard and finally a jobbing engineer, who occupied the Down platform building. The station master’s house was transit accommodation and in a poor state. There was no-one likely to object to our activities and potentially some useful contacts. The existing small band of volunteers had made effective repairs to the up building which now had water and electricity.

John Snell put an enormous amount of work into yet another feasibility study, to which I contributed along with others. My work related to the likely cost of the track and fencing works, based on our existing achievements at Buxton. Crystal ball gazing is a risky business. We did our best, and made all sorts of enquiries. I maintain a reference library which includes most of the house magazines from most of the preserved railways in the United Kingdom, and this is a very useful source of information and contacts. One approach ended in a sort of frustration, when I asked John Allerton what ICI would normally charge per 1000 tons of ballast. He regularly arranged donations of 20 to 60 tons. John shook his head in puzzlement. “But, Timothy, if you want a thousand tons, you can have a thousand tons”. Nevertheless many costs and difficulties were underestimated, because building and operating a preserved railway is in a completely different league from a steam centre. I was assuming that, given time, it would be possible to obtain donations of track materials as we had before. The other side of the coin was that when we decided to speed up construction, the track costs rose considerably. In the end, by hard work and a remarkable slice of luck, my predictions were partially vindicated when the Hams Hall track became available.

Again in hindsight, the principal oversight in our plans was the need to get a realistic commercial operation going at Darley Dale, from the beginning, and that is one thing I would have done differently if we had to do it over again. Nevertheless, the study did succeed in its fundamental objective, which was to convince the Derbyshire Dales District Council that we should be allowed to begin work.

I was sitting in the public benches at the council meeting when the decision was made, and heard one dissenting councillor state that Peak Rail would never join two bits of rail together. I like to think that what happened next may have come as a bit of a shock to him.

At the time I was running a solicitors office in Spennymoor, County Durham, and driving to Buxton every weekend. However I was also engaged in transferring myself to Brooke-Taylors in Buxton, and I was in the town when the licence agreement arrived at their office. I immediately set about arranging operations for the following Saturday week, 1st August 1987. I spoke to John Allerton (sadly no longer with us), sometimes known as Mr Kofkof, as he coughed around his habitual large cigar. He agreed to arrange to supply a further sixty tons of ballast, given free of charge from Tunstead Quarry. I also booked a JCB owned by Joe Brown, a contact from John Snell, and put the word out to as many volunteers as possible. The plan was to uproot, burn and dispose of all vegetation and prepare for the earliest possible start on tracklaying.

On that first day the volunteers were on site early and fanned out into the bush. One supporter came out to see how we were getting on and couldn’t see much. I was sawing the padlock off the gate. He had just enough time to say, “there doesn’t seem to be a lot happening” when, in the middle distance, a large tree suddenly fell over. Then the chain saws started up again. A small cat came through the fence to see what we were doing and became friendly. We called her Fishplate (a name pinched from the Welsh Highland) and she stayed with us for many years. Joe arrived and cleared a way from the gate to the tarmac just in time for the first lorry load of ballast. By this time several large bonfires were blazing, and we hastened to light more. The site virtually disappeared under a pall of smoke, our intention was partly to announce our presence, partly to get rid of as many trees as possible before anyone might stop us. We had not learned the art of firing green branches and the fires tended to become doughnut shaped. Joe set to uprooting stumps, peeling back the turf and piling up spoil.

As expected, the local field club turned up. We need not have worried. They reckoned the trees were nothing but goat willow, of no ecological value. For the future, they recommended old motor tyres as a means of stoking our fires. I went round the local boot sales on the Sunday morning to buy more cups, cutlery and a kettle. We also set to digging ballast out of the site drains, which turned out to be remarkably clear
By the end of the first weekend, there was still a lot of clearance to do, but the bones of the railway were beginning to show again.

Within two weeks the site was clear enough for Arthur Dudson to carry out an initial survey. Arthur was and is a retired track surveyor with a lifetimes experience and a deep love of his subject. “I can do anything you want as long as you don’t ask me to do it in metric. I have to work it out in metric”. In Imperial units he just knew; he went off to prepare some of his beautiful hand drawn plans and the site began to sprout survey pegs. Ballast deliveries continued, 140 tons being spread in early September. The transport contractor was a man called Phil Lomas, who had a hole on his farm he wished to fill, so he would usually take a lorry load of spoil home with him. These early activities attracted a lot of interest, and 21 volunteers attended a site meeting in September, at which I handed over a car boot load of steel keys, fishplates and P.W tools. It felt a bit like arming the french resistance. Max Harris set up the Darley Dale Site Fund, into which volunteers paid money by standing order. It provided small but useful and regular sums of money. I financed some of the initial activities myself.

The first delivery of track took place on the weekend after the meeting. We hired a crane from Twiggs of Matlock and a lorry, and collected about eight miscellaneous rails and a large quantity of sleepers from the parcels shed area at Matlock. The rails were left over from the construction of our siding there, the sleepers came from the Shell sidings at Haydock, and had been dumped to create space at Buxton. These materials were now moved up to Darley Dale, where they were unloaded and assembled in the course of one weekend. I remember that the old hands swarmed onto the lorry as soon as it paused and began throwing sleepers off as it drove slowly down the site. The newer recruits were swiftly taken in charge by Chris Richardson and organised into sleeper carrying teams. Also delivered on that day were some second hand bridge beams obtained from a demolition contract; they were a more dubious asset and were later sold.

Our official plan, not prepared by me, showed one siding only and the track was assembled on this alignment. Over the next few weeks, more ballast arrived and the short length of track, about 65 yards, was carefully manicured with shovels and wheelbarrows. Many surplus sleepers were neatly laid out waiting for further rail. We hoped that this small beginning would take root and grow.

From September to December, not a lot appeared to be happening. However, other projects were progressing up at Buxton, in particular the Mold Junction turntable arrived during this period and track materials, especially turnouts, were being made ready to bring down to Darley Dale, where certain unofficial works were in progress.

At the bottom of the site was the Warney Drook bridge, officially bridge 40, closely followed by road overbridge No39 and Red House cutting. This area was in a bad state though officially outside the area of the licence. Bridge 40 was badly rusted, and Bill Stubbs, our bridge engineer, flatly refused to consider re-using it. The abutments were also suspect on the Up side where the rotted remains of emergency timber trestling stood underneath the span. The cutting was in a vile state. The drains had become blocked with agricultural slurry, which lay in a huge stagnant pool under the bridge. Part of the cutting had been let to graze horses, which had trampled down the cutting sides into the drains. A new recruit, an ex railwayman, told me the cutting had been a notorious wet spot even in BR days. This was my introduction to Derek Ankers, ex Rowsley fireman and one of our stalwart supporters ever since. One of my tasks was to persuade the tenant to give up occupation. If the occupant had chosen to claim an agricultural tenancy then this would have been a serious legal obstacle. In the end the occupation was given up in June 1988, one potentially very difficult problem eliminated.

After heavy rain water would flow down the cutting, and across one of the down trough girders, depositing mud on our nice clean site. We reckoned that gave us some sort of an interest and quietly began to clear out the drains, starting with a stone trench on the up side. This did some good, but not enough. Then we found a catch pit South of bridge 39 which seemed to lead to a cross drain. John Rhead discovered a dry pipe coming out of the abutment on the Down side and rammed draining rods up it. I am told there was a gurgling noise closely followed by a huge flow of filthy smelly water. He was standing directly underneath the mouth of the pipe. If you ever have to perform a similar task, first find the outflow and work upstream from there.

In December things became a lot more active. Martyn Ashworth arranged the purchase of Glendon North Signal box, which was salvaged in pieces from Northamptonshire over about three weekends with the main timbers following later. At the end of the month we somehow began site clearance on the site of what is now Matlock Riverside. One Saturday morning I realised that I was getting very tired. I had driven down from Durham the night before, organised one gang at Buxton, and I was driving down to Darley Dale to organise a second before going on to Matlock to take charge of a third. Suddenly I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on doing this. Fortunately various competent leaders were emerging and I had the wit to delegate and let them get on with things, but it did mean I had sometimes to spend more time managing rather than working myself.

Early in the new year of 1988 we were able to begin work on another salvage contract which I had been arranging with Tarmac, consisting of about 220 yards of track, including chairs but minus the sleepers, which they wished to retain. This material was at Hillhead Quarry above Buxton, and was probably the last track remaining on the original alignment of the Cromford and High Peak Railway. The track had been out of use since the Ladmanlow section closed in 1973. The rails were Midland section from the nineteenth century and the chairs were the most amazing mixture I ever saw in one place, including LSWR, MR, NER and LNWR as well as the Big Four. The GWR chairs were spiked to original C&HP stone blocks which had been put back into use in WWII due to a shortage of timber; those last we left behind. This site was high up, very exposed, and the weather was appalling. I remember Pete Lang towing rails with his landrover in a blizzard and we really felt we were in one of the most inhospitable places imaginable. How times change, I now live in a house which looks down on this site. Partly due to the weather, partly due to lack of money, we were not able to bring the rails down until May. A large quantity of turnout components and timbers were brought down from Buxton Midland at the same time.

We were able to lay a further 100 yards of track at once, the rails were craned direct off the lorry into the waiting sleepers. This was particularly satisfying as for the first time we had put something back together faster than we had got it in pieces. Arthur Dudson and myself had unofficially modified the plan to include two extra sidings, which I was convinced would be needed, and we now had the means to construct the turnouts for these. Also at about this time I undertook a small salvage contract at Worthington on the long disused Melbourne line. The track was worn out, and totally overgrown. As far as I could make out, the line had been in limbo since the demise of the Melbourne Military Railway, despite an unsuccessful preservation attempt. Sustrans had taken over and were about to have the track ripped out by Trackwork Ltd. I bought the groundframe and associated fittings for £30, and we cleared enough undergrowth to get a permanent way trolley to the site. Perhaps that counts as absolutely the last rail working over this section. I remember myself and Mick Thomas unloading very, very late at night at Darley Dale South Yard, as we now called it. The ground frame now controls the exit from the sidings. The BBC filmed our efforts on 21/22nd June. They were supposed to film us building a turnout, but arrived so late that we had to partly dismantle it and then rebuild it for the cameras.

All sorts of activity was now going on. In July we laid a token 45 ft section of track at Millers Dale, and then built a fence round it to railway clearances. The object was to prove physically that if a railway were built, vehicles would still be able to drive down the remaining width of the trackbed to maintain the Monsal Trail. This was then dismantled and taken down to Darley Dale along with many loads of small items from Buxton, where we had been accumulating tackle for years. We remained critically short of sleepers and sometimes set them out at double spacing. We began to mechanise and bought an ancient compressor from the plant dealer down the road.

My view down the years is that old but reliable second hand plant is often the most cost effective for use by volunteers. It generally doesn’t get used often enough to wear it out, is a lot cheaper than hire, and you don’t worry so much about it being stolen. The usual cause of failure is forgetting to oil it, which affects old and new alike. We had tried hiring a compressor, and it cost £50 for a week. We bought the 1988 example for £500, and it finally expired in 2006, after eighteen years of intermittent hard work and almost no maintenance.

The increasing amounts of tackle needed storage, and we built a small security compound with telegraph poles and wire netting brought down from Buxton. Rob Davies brought a caravan which provided the initial volunteer accommodation. The first piece of rolling stock was the sleeping coach, purchased from the Dart Valley. The delivery driver got lost and came over from Chesterfield by the back way through Two Dales. This road is known to Peak Rail volunteers at least as “The Corkscrew”. It involves a very steep hill with two sharp bends and I believe he had quite a time getting down.

Meanwhile I was trying to find somewhere to take large quantities of spoil from the site. At first I tried Enthovens, who have a large lead processing site on the other side of the valley where there used to be a lead mine. There was a large barren tip outside their works. It didn’t belong to them and when I tracked down the owner to Bristol, he wasn’t interested, claiming that the tip contained valuable minerals which he proposed to work (he never has). Then I heard of a farmer off the road to Winster, the next village but one over the hill, who would accept spoil for dumping at his farm. I drove up and made enquiries, and eventually got directions to Jim Hardy. He lived and farmed on the hillside, and wanted to extend his yard sideways, hence the need for spoil. Being so close at hand, it was quite possible to send him 100 tons via Mr Lomas in the course of a Saturday morning. Twenty years ago that sort of thing was quite legal, just one of the additional restrictions we today take for granted.

During the summer of 1988 we were granted a licence to occupy the trackbed to Matlock. There was one serious gap to the south of Bridge 38 where a drainage ditch had been dug through the trackbed. A concrete pipe had been laid and encased in concrete, but the gap had never been filled in and the spoil was heaped up on the trackbed. We improvised a bridge over the Warney Brook with crossing timbers laid across the Up bridge deck. I tested it with a dumper loaded with ballast and we then sent Joe over it. He filled the hole in the course of an afternoon, patting the fill down as he went. Bill Stubbs was not at all pleased, as the fill should have been laid and compacted with a roller in six inch layers. We would expect settlement, perhaps six inches in the first year, one inch in the second.

I scratched my head a bit and pointed out that on the most optimistic reckoning it would be two years before we ran passenger trains, and Bill agreed that would be satisfactory, as indeed it proved.

One of the volunteers then drove his car over the bridge hoping to load up with logs for firewood. His sump collided with an LMS track centre marker, a fishplate embedded in a large block of concrete, with a hacksaw cut in the middle for measuring from. He retreated bleeding oil from a split sump, and I was worried that he might have moved the mark.

The way was now clear for the first overland journey to Matlock, i.e. down the trackbed, which took place on 23rd July, 1988. We needed to prepare an exchange siding to receive the steam crane from Toton, and some coaches which were in store at Butterley, and on which we were paying siding rent. The crane had been purchased by a consortium of ten members, including myself, on the basis that we would swap it for shares in the public issue which was about to commence. At this time there was officially no access from the Matlock end, as British Railways were worried about the condition of the retaining wall along the river and did not want us anywhere near it. I had managed to infiltrate about 40 sleepers, but there was no means of getting rail in, and I felt we might as well have them back at Darley Dale.

By this time we had acquired our long suffering dumper, bought by the Buxton Site Fund - another second hand bargain. Joe and his JCB set to improving the ramp up to the temporary deck at bridge 35, and then we set out. If I recall correctly, I was riding with Kevin Jones in the cab of his pick-up with Joe in front knocking over any trees in the way. There were not very many of them and all went well until we reached Bridge 37.

The old decks consisted of steel troughs, just large enough to take a 12” square bridge timber, and the space around these was filled in with 2” planking, which was in fairly doubtful condition. Joe was carefully briefed to stick to the beams and we drove ahead to show him how it was done, with the wheels of the pick-up carefully lined up on the outer flange of the trough, which was all of 6” wide. Joe charged after us and missed the beams completely. He got a surprisingly long way, and it wasn’t until he had got to the middle of the bridge that the planking burst down under his back wheels.

For a moment I was seriously worried, as the JCB leaned over at a precarious angle, but Joe didn’t seem to turn a hair. He managed to get his rear bucket down on the abutment, levelled up and levered himself across with his buckets in a matter of minutes. We carried on down to the site of what is now Matlock Riverside where Joe levelled the ground and we loaded most of the sleepers. On the way back we passed Mick Hadwin, who had come out to explore in his landrover. We met at Bridge 37 and we swung in to let him pass. “Have you got the single line token?” I asked, and then warned him to be careful of the deck, though the hole in it was pretty obvious.

“First Overland” had a sequel when we were later attacked in a letter in the local press for wantonly destroying rare and protected orchids at Matlock. This was a bit of a puzzle as they were not mentioned in the previous site wildlife survey. The Matlock Field Club sprang to our defence and pointed out that the orchids were not rare, or protected, and grew in large numbers in the old quarry, from which they had no doubt spread onto the freshly cleared ground which Joe had levelled.

At around this time I was negotiating to buy the disused sidings at the premises of Gridwelds of Wigan, who made weldmesh. It turned out to be the nastiest salvage operation we had undertaken to date, and for a long time it was the yardstick by which others were measured. The Gridweld site was 2 hours drive from Buxton. The rails were short, so there were lots of fishplate bolts and they were all rusted solid. The track was an unusual pattern, flatbottom rail bolted down to mild steel plates with ordinary chair screws. It wasn’t a type ever used on the main line, but with the short lengths it would be ideal for the Matlock siding project.

By the time the Gridweld track was in pieces, BR were showing slight signs of movement, and said it might be possible for us to have access over their land for tracklaying. It wasn’t exactly yes, but it gave us some sort of a loophole, and the very next weekend I drove a crane and a convoy of lorries through it. Some of the track was taken out in panels, and by the time BR found out, the siding was a long way towards completion. They were not, officially, pleased. I had entirely misunderstood their attitude, and where was their bufferstop? Somehow it had accidentally migrated to the end of our new siding, and we dragged it back for them, with some replacement timbers to show there were no hard feelings.

All very naughty and irresponsible perhaps, but the Matlock loop was for practical purposes out of use, and we had achieved a similar unofficial connection some years before with the parcels shed siding. John Snell was able to convince BR that this was all an innocent misunderstanding by that clot Tim Oaks. The incident also seems to have proved to BR that our consulting engineer was right, that the retaining wall was able to bear heavy weights, and so we were able to resolve the access problem for the future, for light loads at least.

At about this time I had a chat with Jim Hardy about his farmyard. Martyn was planning trackbed clearance in a big way. This is what is known as a Dutch Auction. “Jim, can you take 500 tons of spoil?”
“No problem, send it up”.
“Can you take 1000 tons?”
“I think so…”
“Well, how about 2000 tons?”
“You’ll have to send a machine up to level it out”. Problem solved.

We used to drive up to Winster quite regularly at one time, there was a pub with very good food there. There seemed to be a lot of new farm roads on Jim Hardy’s property and the surfacing looked very like spent railway ballast. If so, good luck and many thanks.

Meanwhile Martyn Ashworth had been talking to Courtaulds with a view to salvaging track materials from their sidings at Flint in North Wales, and after a long period of waiting, the matter had come to a head. The deal was that once the demolition contractors had taken the rail, we could have all the sleepers, crossing timbers and chairs we could remove in the course of a weekend.

Martyn had many connections and mobilised every volunteer he could find, together with a considerable amount of transport and a Manitou rough terrain forklift. He even booked a minibus to take volunteers on from Buxton. It was quite a party. On the Saturday we had 27 volunteers on site in Wales, plus an unloading party of about a dozen back at Darley Dale where Chris Richardson was in charge. Chris was in charge of the “chicken sexing” – dividing the secondhand sleepers between main line and siding quality. This is an esoteric art and not many people can do it.

Back at the Courtaulds site, an unholy scramble was under way. The scrap merchants didn’t like competition. Neither did we, and that is about as far as the agreement went. They wanted rail chairs, and finding us busy at one end of site, they went to the other, where a second Peak Rail gang was operating. Foiled, they went back to the middle and came upon Arthur Heane and a third gang going through their skips and throwing out rail chairs. They retired to the main factory where we could hear the frequent crashing of something heavy being thrown down a lift shaft.

Courtaulds had quite a system once. Basically there was a big factory with an oval of track round it and an engine shed in a corner, just like a model railway. One unusual feature was a bridge under the North Wales coast line which had a headroom of only about nine feet, and a gradient of about one in ten down to it and up again on the other side, I’m not sure what for as the tracks on the far side had gone completely and there was no time to explore. There is a preserved Peckett 0-4-0 at Quainton known as “The Flying Bufferbeam” owing to its very low height which I think came from here.

There was not much time to think. If the timbers looked good, the Manitou loaded them on a lorry. If not we unscrewed the chairs and let the timber lie. My job was principally to sort out timbers which still had life in them. Fortunately a lot of them were Australian Jarrah, known to its friends as “organic concrete” and very heavy to carry. I’m told it won’t burn or float. It will split, and many of these Jarrahs had several bolts fitted through them sideways to prevent this, so if you find such a sleeper on Peak Rail, you will know where it came from. The chairs were a mixture of all sorts, including quite a lot of SECR and even some marked CLC – Cheshire Lines Committee. We concentrated on the standard S1 chairs of whatever origin.

By Tuesday night, Darley Dale yard looked like it had been bombed with sleepers. I reckon we had taken out about 1500 sleepers and crossing timbers in five days flat, plus many hundreds of chairs. It took ages to sort them all out, but we used them to complete the track we had been laying out in the sidings and set out sleepers for the main line for the full length of the yard. Now we were short of rail. It was just about the last act before the 1988 share issue and a huge boost at just the right time. Another boost, for me in particular, was the steaming of “Duke” at Buxton; the expense of the overhaul had been born by the owning group and the Manpower Services Commission. I own the largest individual share in the engine, and funding the purchase and repair involved a certain amount of sacrifice. I was very proud to be photographed on the footplate with the Duke of Devonshire at the launch of the share issue. Maybe we were getting just a little overconfident.

Up to this point we had been building the railway largely on our overdraft, and now the money began to flood in, at the rate of thousands of pounds per day. I read once that any company which increases its’ turnover by 50% in a year can expect some growing pains. Ours went up by 1000% in six weeks.

We began in a reasonably sensible fashion by purchasing rails from the Midland Railway Trust, who were clearing Cadely Hill Colliery. I think we paid £1 per foot, which is the equivalent of about £80 per ton, and a slight slippage on our budget figure of £50 per ton. However it was nice rail, and we didn’t have to go and dismantle it. One slight snag was that most of it was drilled for GWR pattern fishplates, which have a different hole spacing. We had to saw ½” off each end of each rail with our hand operated railsaw. This was a brute of a thing, and took roughly 900 strokes to cut a rail. It was known to its users as “99 change hands”. I believe it is still in our stores somewhere, I’m glad to say I have had no cause to look for it for a long time. I tried cutting 1” off the end of one rail. The joint looked absolutely awful, so we used that rail to cut down for a closure and carried on. Most of the joints were cut by Tony Joyce and Arthur Heane

One nasty incident took place at this time and is still very vivid even after many years. We were unloading a lorry load of rail by hand. This involved tipping the rails over the edge with crowbars, which is hard work. The load included some 60’ rails and was carried on an extending trailer, also known as a trombone. The spine is telescopic, and slides out leaving a gap in the main deck. Five or six of us were engaged in this work, and Stewart Donohoe was working next to me and next to the gap. He turned to me and said some thing like “we shall have to make sure these lads mind the gap”. The next thing I knew, he had moved sideways onto thin air and I saw him fall headfirst to the ground.

He was lucky to land on a heap of freshly dug soil. Hard ballast would have been far worse. He was pale and shaky but thought he would be OK after a rest, so we left him sitting on a pile of timbers and threw off the rest of the rails. By then he had gone a bit green and it was obvious he was really hurt. I sent for an ambulance and telephoned his wife, and in nearly thirty years that remains the most difficult thing I have ever done on the railway. I don’t like to think about it much; I have seen a few accidents since but none as bad as that, and I have made sure to get first aid training. If you get the chance, then you should get training too. Stewart had a broken shoulder, which has never fully healed, and but for the relatively soft earth….

This accident was a considerable factor in our decision to buy a 22RB crawler crane to do the heavy lifting.

Contractors were engaged to clear the trackbed and the work was to be funded by a derelict land grant. The clearance went forward at a remarkable rate. A big 360 machine worked along the trackbed, filling a string of tipper lorries, which dumped spoil at Jim Hardy’s farm and then went up to Shining Bank Quarry near Bakewell to collect fresh ballast, which the excavator spread behind it. The filthy mess in the cutting was replaced by beautiful clean stone, and the excavator kept moving towards Matlock.

One consequence of the site clearance was that the coal yard wall fell down. It was made from railway sleepers slotted into girders, and had been pushed over by their loading shovel. When we dug out the heaps of muck at the back there was nothing to hold it up. Mick Thomas, who had recently become an employee, went round to complain. He did not get much sympathy

“I suppose you lot think a surprise delivery of coal and railway sleepers is some sort of tragedy?” It turned out they knew each other. The manager had a Jensen and Mick used to fix them.

Mick was and remains a complex character, operating on several different levels. He could act the part of chairman of the board, know his ground to an inch and dominate a meeting with outsiders with tact and good humour. He was also a meticulous engineer and a good lateral thinker. The volunteers would follow him anywhere, partly out of curiosity and in awe of his sheer ripe bad language. He enjoyed trouble, and thrived in a crisis. On the other hand he was occasionally inclined to pessimism, and in this way we complemented each other, for I can be over optimistic and impetuous. We had many good humoured arguments; together we made one normal balanced human being.

Meanwhile Martyn Ashworth had bid for a considerable number of mark 1 coaches, on the grounds that they would soon be extinct, and we would eventually need plenty to operate a railway to Buxton. It was a bit disconcerting to find that all our bids had been accepted – the total was several thousand pounds, and now we had to transport them. The Matlock exchange siding was hurriedly extended using sleepers from Courtaulds so that they could come in by rail. In hindsight we would have done much better to buy just a few coaches and bring them to safety at Darley Dale by road. Once the local vandals had found them the coaches suffered badly. We did what we could by putting up barbed wire fences and boarding the windows. This may have slowed the damage down slightly; only a presence on site seems to give security.

The trackbed clearance reached Matlock in time for Christmas, and the next problem was to find some track. Martyn Ashworth bought a supply of bullhead concrete sleepers from a merchant; you could say they were over budget, but our budget was too optimistic anyway, and the sleepers have given excellent service. We began laying these in Red House Cutting, in case it got wet again, and the 22RB started clanking its way to Matlock at the head of steel. Every week the works train ran that little bit further. Being on the first train over track you have just laid yourself is very rewarding. In March the Barclay 0-4-0ST “Harry” was brought down and spent a week on the works trains, and by the end of the week the track had reached the site of the footpath crossing at the top of Red House Cutting.

I was spending a lot of my time scouting for more materials, and I was not having much luck. The price of scrap steel goes in cycles, and this seemed to be one of the upswings. I remember bidding £60,000 for rather a lot of track at a power station near Stoke, but the eventual price was somewhere over £80,000. I also failed to buy track at the Tollerton Farm Railway auction. A railway had been built over the fields and it had some quite good rails. I was up against a millionaire from Jersey called Don Pallot, who was there in person in his bowler hat. He wanted his own personal railway and was out to get it. The track was divided into various lots and after the first one the scrap merchants stood back and left us to it. The pair of us slugged it out in the fields under the auctioneers nose. It didn’t matter how high I went, he would go one better.

I think it is worth setting out at this point just what was involved in being a director in a railway preservation company operating at full pressure. The week began on a Sunday night in my flat, writing up a journal and compiling a “to do” list for the following week. During the week I would telephone contacts in spare moments at work to arrange such items as crane hire, or ballast delivery and write begging letters to any siding owners I could find. In the evenings I would keep in touch with the other project leaders to see how the midweek work was shaping, and from Tuesday onwards I would make and receive several phone calls each night to the volunteers, often some hours each night. One Friday in four would require me to attend a board meeting, usually from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. Saturday and Sunday would be spent either working on site or out on reconnaissance. I reckoned to keep a working knowledge of every possible industrial siding within 70 miles of the railway. On Sunday night I would put my feet up and write a new list. In such time as I could spare, I was a solicitor specialising in criminal work, appearing in court up to 5 days per week and frequently on overnight call to the police station. You could say that this was the life of a mad railway building monk. It was the most tremendous fun.

Martyn Ashworth and Andy Palfrey managed to set up two salvage jobs on British Railways, one at Ardwick, Manchester and the other at Templeborough near Rotherham. Neither of these were ideal, but it was a difficult time. By the time they were over we might have done better to buy from the track merchants. The Ardwick sidings included some of the most peculiar track I have ever seen, consisting of flatbottom rails sitting on timber sleepers without baseplates and held down with a random mixture of dog spikes, chair screws and other bits and pieces. The rails had once had copper bonding wires fitted at the ends and there were bites out of the ends where the bonding had been cut out. These rails were most definitely not suitable for the main line. I didn’t go on the Templeborough job, I think it was midweek and I couldn’t get time off work. Those who went said it was the worst one they’d ever been on, worse than Gridweld, which was the benchmark up to that point.

The results were distinctly miscellaneous, but we made the best of things by swapping worn rails for better ones in the sidings, and also exchanged the flatbottom rails for more bullhead from the Midland Railway Trust. They were not entirely happy, as when they tried to use the rails, which they had inspected and taken “as seen”, they discovered that they were about ½” wider in the base than normal, and would not fit normal baseplates. This explains why the sidings were so peculiar in the first place, we really had no idea that the rails were like that. I’d had too many sessions with the hand saw to care much, and other worries now burst upon us.

There had been no effective budget control, and despite the share money coming in we were operating on a considerable overdraft, and the bills for the trackbed clearance were still coming in. All sorts of useful extras had been tacked on, such as surfacing the yard with crusher run stone. We had also brought in a second hand bridge for use above Rowsley, which had absolutely nothing to do with the job in hand. The flow of share applications slowed to a trickle.

Martyn had arranged the trackbed clearance on the basis that most of the cost would be covered by a derelict land grant, and now it appeared that something had gone wrong (I never did get a convincing explanation as to just what, and was too busy to find out for myself. I don’t believe it was Martyn’s doing) and the grant money would not be coming. This left a hole in our cash flow of about £80,000. We had a project on the back burner, the sale of a portion of Buxton site, but we were at the limit of our overdraft and the creditors were getting restless. This was in about March. I had a certain experience of debt collection procedures and I remember advising the board that I believed I could keep things in hand for about three months, but after that it would get painful, and that it would be a bumpy ride. The fact was that too many directors, including me, had spent too much time managing their departments and not enough directing the company as a whole.

In fact it was December before we were in any way clear, which was eight months and not three. The original land sale proposal had been to sell the site of the goods shed at Buxton to the Buxton Mineral Water Company, who were owned by Perrier. They were tied to their site by a pipeline from St Anne’s Well in the town centre and desperately needed to expand. They wanted to buy one plot from us, and a second from British Railways. Negotiations plodded slowly forward. Then B.R. pulled out. The Operations Department had vetoed the Estates Department agreement.

By this time the creditor situation was desperate. I was keeping a chart which listed creditors down by enforcement actions across – solicitors letter, proceedings issued, judgement obtained, bailiffs instructed, winding up threatened, winding up petition issued. The bank just did not want to know. By some very narrow margins, the last box was never ticked. Even the most optimistic directors agreed that five brake coaches might be too many, and some were sold. I constantly stressed the impending sale and the company paid what instalments it could. Every day I went up to Buxton site to collect the mail and see if there was anything nasty, and as often as not, there was. The worst thing was that there was no definite end date. It finished with a very fat file, an extremely stressed solicitor, and a fatherly chat with the senior partner who expressed his formal concern at the amount of time I was spending on this client. At the end of it all I sent the railway a token account. I doubt if that covered the phone bill and the postage.

This delaying action created the time which Roger Horne needed to re-shape the deal with the water company at a full market value. We ended up selling more land, the goods shed and the land leading up to it. The final price was £385,000, not bad for one third of the land for which we had paid £50,000 four years previously. I could not have coped without the support of the ordinary volunteers, none of whom uttered a word of reproach. I have heard it said, by someone who should have known better, that railway volunteers are merely unpaid employees and should be treated as such. If that were so, Peak Rail would have died in 1989. The volunteers stuck it out. They continued to build the railway with the materials in stock and banded together to buy engineers rolling stock, which was donated to the company through the Peak Rail Stock Fund, of which more was to be heard in later years.

It was during this difficult time that the volunteers also clubbed together to buy and transport Bamford signal box. This expensive and very public operation was great fun, but did not make my relationship with our creditors any easier. Two volunteers in particular, Andy Wood and Nigel Brandon, formed a highly unofficial partnership called “Mutant Trading” which found things and sold them. I felt it best not to enquire too closely; I suspected that scrap metal and railway sleepers were involved somewhere. They also bought and sold railway relics, and on one occasion I bought a Stanier whistle for “The Duke”. Barrels of diesel, bags of cement, creosote and all the essential small stores required to build a railway mysteriously continued to arrive. Things were very tight but the work never actually stopped. There was plenty of work to be done which required little or no expenditure, such as stripping the old ballast off bridge 40 and breaking out the concrete haunches, in which Terry Perkins, the human crane, played a leading part. We also tried our hands at laying the hawthorn trees as hedging down near Bridge 36, which was in relatively good condition and was being refurbished by a team led by Mike Hancox.

On a lighter note, Mick Thomas installed the ground frame for the South Yard, and made a nice operating platform round it with some planks he found lying in the yard. I admired the work at the end of the day and came upon him as he was having a well deserved cup of tea in the portacabin which we used as a volunteers mess. Just then a hired van arrived driven by X, a former volunteer who was in the process of removing his rolling stock, at the request of the company, owing to what we felt were his chaotic and risky working habits. It happens occasionally. Anyway, X drove up to the old van body in which we stored waste paper for salvage. It was very full and he began throwing out bundles of newspaper like a man possessed. “Time to go” I said to Mick, who was savouring his cup of tea, and in no mood to hurry. “What’s the rush?”

“X is shifting that pile of paper in the hope of finding the floorboards from his van at the bottom of it, and when he finds they’re not there, there will be trouble”.
“It’s not my problem”.
“And where do you suppose the timber for that ground frame came from?”
X had abandoned his projects many months before and things had been moved around, but I had recognised the remains of the timbers in the ground frame.
Mick now quite saw the point and we made a hasty retreat. Since then I have managed to avoid X up to now.

Finally in December contracts were exchanged for the sale of the land, with completion due on 31st January. At last there was something definite to tell the creditors, and a ten percent deposit on the sale price to keep the most pressing ones happy. However we now had to clear the workshops we had spent so painfully built up and equipped. Andy Lynch inspected the machinery and condemned most of it as scrap. We took a tenancy of the old goods shed at Matlock, where Palins had pulled out, with the idea of building up an alternative base, and for the time being at least it made a useful store. I had been on the very first working party at Buxton, and now here I was on the last. I had very mixed feelings. It says a tremendous amount for the volunteers that they stuck it out and cleared the site. We had saved the project, and we had disposed of two significant liabilities; the roof on the shed was in poor condition and a large slice of it blew off very soon after the sale. The mineral water company had also bought a major length of retaining wall in very poor condition, which they wisely buried.

Martyn Ashworth had accepted a post on the Swanage Railway and was about to depart, taking his portacabin office with him. He also arranged for the removal of some of the small industrial locomotives from Buxton, which was a good thing as it was difficult to see how they would find space or purpose at Darley Dale. Phil Brown and the 9F group decided that 92214 and 92219 would move to Butterley. I could not blame them. They had just got to the point where they needed a sophisticated workshop, and now we had nothing remotely suitable, Palins shed was all very well as a store but would require a lot of effort to become a workshop. Martyn was keen to take “Duke” to Swanage and offered a very attractive hire fee. The view of the other owners and myself was that it was too vital to Peak Rail to take away.

Martyn and Phil were two leading figures among the volunteers, and with all our recent troubles, and so many locomotives leaving, a lot of people were wondering just what would happen next. Fortunately Mick Thomas had recently joined the board as S& T director, and whatever his formal title, he now took command and rallied the volunteers. From now on there would be a very tight focus on our immediate project, i.e. to build and equip a railway to Matlock, and no distractions allowed.

To be continued

 

Mutant Trading did actually have a bank account a number of signatories, myself, Nigel and Derek Ankers (he was sensible and mature). We did buy and sell railwayana - the whistle that we sold Tim was one of two that we had bought along with other bits and bobs, Tim's purchase covered our initial investment by 200% and together we other sales we turned our £100 investment into about £400 profit. A lot of "Mutant's" monies went towards the purchase of Bamford Box - £150 plus VAT - not a bad purchase