Lost Railways of Yorkshire: The Railway that was Almost Lost - Whitby and Pickering

hi I'm whole history nerd and on this episode of The Lost Railways of Yorkshire I'm very happy to say we're going to be looking at a real way so it didn't stay lost for very long the Whitby and Pickering Railway though you might know it better as the North Yorkshire Moors Railway [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign foreign [Music] ERS Railway is probably one of the most famous Heritage Railways in the world it's been in television dramas and films it's basically an absolute film star in its own right with its beautiful period appropriate stations that make it perfect for reenactments so why you may ask am I including this on a list of lost Railways because very clearly you'll be thinking it's been found because here it is well here there are some bits of it that are indeed lost and B is it nice just for once to have a railway that has a happy ending the Whitby and Pickering Railway lies as you would probably expect between the market town of Pickering at the south end and the fishing town of Whitby at the North and Crosses some of yorkshire's grandest and wildest Countryside the North Yorkshire Moors National Park less Bleak than the Dales over in the pennines this rolling Moorland provides a wonderfully picturesque Journey when seen from a train it also has the claim of being one of yorkshire's oldest Railways being built during the early 1830s the fishing and wailing Port of Whitby was surrounded on all sides except for one by the Moors and this made it a remote and often inaccessible place to other places on the interior of the country it had been used to travel via the sea rather than over land for all of its trade and commerce but Britain's wailing trade was in sharp decline the local Allen Works nearby had likewise scaled down and the town's shipbuilding was operating at only a tenth of its former strength the sea connection was no longer as viable as it used to be and whilst its fishing fleet was still bringing in the catches the businesses of the Town were concerned about how to convey them elsewhere in 1834 however there was a meeting in Whitby between two of the largest Personalities in Railway history that would reverse this slide of bad fortune A Man Called George Hudson had recently come into a small fortune by way of inheritance and was fascinated by the newfangled Railways of the Northeast but he was in Whitby primarily to check on some of his properties and he bumped into a man called George Stevenson the man largely considered to be the father of the railways because he is the man who built the very first paying passenger Railways in Britain Stevenson was almost 20 years older than Hudson but the two clearly made a significant impression on each other with Hudson's burning ambition to transform the countries with Railways sparking Stevenson's desire to engineer them Stevenson was in Whitby because he'd been asked to assess the possibility of a horse-drawn Tramway between Whitby and Pickering in order to help move passengers and Freight from the small port to the busy Market Town these steep inclines of the Moors ruled out at the time steamler commotion as the Locos were nowhere near powerful enough to deal with such Hills while Stevenson reckoned that the whole route could probably be made with only one poly driven steep incline near girthland now the idea of this horse-drawn Tramway wasn't a new one that people of Whitby had long been wanting to make some kind of a route between Whitby and the Inland for about 50 years an idea of a canal had been flirted about that long ago we Yorkshire ferca are a little bit like tolkien's ends in that regard we're very slow to reach decisions and we're never Hasty when it comes to spending large amounts of cash but I can attest to this being a yorkshireman myself now when it came to George Stevenson coming on board the idea had been floated to not run not to pick a ring but to run the railway northwards into the Northeast to meet up with the Stockton and Darlington Railway and Stevenson himself thought this was a terrible idea because there it would have to go up an enormous number of inclines and would have lots of expensive engineering works on the route but it would still be quicker to ship it via boat to Whitby than buy a such a proposed Railway line now there had been some hope in Whitby that curl would be found in the Moors under and around the town thus sparking a new industrial wave in the town to replace the industries that it was already losing but George Stevenson's idea was to actually go with the Canal builders and go to Pickering instead and his idea there was really it was easier to engineer but B the coal could indeed still be shipped into Whitby from the Northeast and then loaded onto a train to head into the Inland in Pickering thus giving investors a nice tasty return on their money which when you're trying to get investment from yorkshireman that's always a very very good idea to do now when Whitby station was actually finally built it was actually built here on the remains of a shipbuilding yard ironically enough replacing the old industry with a new one and when it was originally built it certainly wouldn't have been the building you see behind me it would actually have been somewhere halfway between a railway station and a coaching Inn because really that's what it was it would have had stables and it would have had an inn for the night but in the 1840s when the Yorker North Midland Railway came and took over the company Unleashed George Townsend Andrews their fabled architect onto the entire line station buildings and he rebuilt this entirely and it originally had an all-encompassing Houston trust style roof which you can kind of see the shape off from here even though it sadly lost the roof sometime in the 20th century and it's a magnificent building it's built from sandstone ashlar blocks really finely cut blocks that you can almost fit together without mortar without leaving a gap which is an expensive way to build a building it's got these lovely rusticated coins at the corners and surrounding the main entrances and no one but two particles for the entrance with lovely Tuscan style pillars it's an expensive way to make a statement but that's what George Hudson of the York and North Midland Railway was all about making a big statement and the railways had to be presented as this opulent luxurious successful way to travel and Hudson really put his money behind the buildings for that reason and it's easy to see actually when you see this from the outside it's almost like georgetown's end Andrews was actually using this as a trial run from any of the features that he later used in his absolute magnum opus Paragon station at Hull which ironically enough also was his swan song as he died only a few years after its completion but whatever it is Whitby station remains an absolute Gem of a station and bizarrely way way more elaborate than a town of whitby's size really necessitated but I'm glad it's here by 1836 the line was opened and it was indeed horse drawn for its entire length so why make a horse-drawn Railway instead of just getting in a horse-drawn carriage and going on the roads well in the early 19th century there were no roads as we know them today a road was just a muddy Country Lane churned by endless horses and cartwheels there was often a compact bed of aggregate under it but on stretches in the middle of nowhere there were often no communities to keep the roads in good condition leaving them full of potholes and eroded by the weather the ride would Lurch around them comfortably and of course in those remote Moors there was always the risk of being wheelied by Highwaymen whereas a carriage on Rails had several benefits a much much smoother ride for a start and the line would take a much more direct route than the often Meandering country lanes meaning that Journeys would not only be more comfortable but much much faster making the trip in just two and a half hours in this case in fact the new Railway proved a roaring success not just for the fruit that had been anticipated but also in the conveying of those passengers Whitby renovated its port and steam packet Services ferried Goods here from Newcastle and Hull to be taken Inland by the railway to Pickering this newfangled invention brought all manner of Industry to the previously quiet storm-whipped Moors in 1836 an outcrop of Ironstone was found near Grossmont that supplied for many years the prolific Cleveland iron industry lime Kilns sprang up near Grossmont to process Limestone brought up from Pickering passenger figures too were on the rise but the railway was in trouble right from the start the estimated cost of building the line ended up being well somewhat on the optimistic side as it turned out George Stevenson had originally costed the line at two thousand pounds per mile but with all of the engineering works the bridges over the many rivers tunnels and embankments it ended up going over twice that ended up costing around 4 400 pounds per mile in mod money that's over 350 000 pounds just for a single mile of track by 1837 this debt was so heavy that they had to raise another 30 000 pounds worth of investment unfortunately the freight trains were so heavy that they required many horses as a good example to Ferry 120 tons of Iron Stone from Grossmont to Whitby took 20 horses and 10 men to control them not a financially efficient way to work they wouldn't be until the 1840s that things would transform and our old dodgy pal George Hudson comes back into the frame again but more on that later in the meantime are there any remnants of the old horse-drawn Tramway is still left why yes yes there are in both Grossmont and girthland now this tunneling Grossmont behind me is one of the last few surviving relics of that horse-drawn past as you can see it's actually tiny and there's no way you'd fit a steam locomotive through there it's almost like it was designed to fit a horse and a carriage because it was and it's one of the last pieces of on the line that was actually work that George Stevenson was responsible for and he had one of his assistants a chap called Sonic Design This who later got told off for wasting money on this beautiful fur medieval castellated front and it's so different from what you would normally see at the mouth of a railway tunnel but of course these were the early days these were the pioneering days of Railways nobody really knew what standards were going to happen with regards to tunnels or stations or anything they were just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what would stick and whilst making them look like medieval castles didn't catch on it's rather refreshing that it still exists here today but of course in the 1840s that chance meeting between George Hudson and George Stevenson was actually to become relevant I know you've been waiting for the relevance of that to sink in here it is because in the mid-1840s George Hudson's Flagship Railway company the York and North Midland Railway purchased the Whitby and Pickering line in its entirety and of course George Hudson was all about the Pomp and ceremony of Railways pulled by locomotives he didn't want any of that horse-drawn nonsense so he set about as soon as he bought it making this suitable for locomotive running and that meant not this little piddly tunnel here but this one behind me which was bored initially for a two-track side by side not something that was in the original plans of course further up the line we'll see that there was another major point that was a sticking point for transforming this into locomotive running but we'll save that for when we get to the next stop at girthland [Music] George Hudson since meeting George Stevenson had become the figure commonly dubbed the railway King by the Press he was chair of three major Railway companies and by the mid-1840s earned or had controlling interests in almost a third of Britain's entire Railway Network and Hudson's aim was indeed to develop it as a network in the rest of the country the railways tended to be small rural lines that connected small town air to small town b or London to small town air and each Railway line was run by its own company this resulted in some small towns down south having two or even three different Railway stations but Hudson had his sight set on a much less scattergun approach one that would give the Northeast a structural Advantage for decades in terms of its infrastructure he made his company sit down and work together to meet their lines Under One Roof rather than having several stations scattered in a single town and he bought up lines in order to make them fit with this grand plan he'd always had an eye on the Whitby and Pickering line as he had a special interest in Whitby he did later become its MP for many years after all and seeing a chance with their financial was he bought the company in 1844 absorbing it into his Flagship company the York and North Midland Railway the company had just obtained an act of parliament to drive a line through from York to Scarborough which passed only a few miles south of Pickering and he realized that if connected properly via Railway Whitby could become a major holiday destination he sets about working with the folk of Whitby to make this happen he bought the Westcliff fields and started developing rows of boarding houses some of the streets there still Barry's name to this day George Street and Hudson Street and a grand hotel the Royal was built as we've already seen Hudson wanted to convert the railway to full locomotive running and he set about rebuilding all of the stations with this in mind sending in georgetown's and Andrews to design new stations at Whitby Pickering levisham Grossmont and girthland and began relaying the track with much heavier Duty rails in order to take the weight and activity of steam locomotives a new tunnel and Stern Bridge were constructed at Grossmont and many of the original Stevenson bridges over the esque too small to be safe for running Locos over were replaced by Iron ones some parts of the original line were even deviated from and curbs and gradients smoothed out there was however one spot right in the middle of the line that proved to be a fly in the ointment for this plant to run lurkers through the entire length and that was at Beck Hall next to girthland one Troublesome remnant of the old horse-drawn Tramway That Couldn't at the time be easily deviated around [Music] now I've mentioned that this is a railway that was almost lost I mean it's literally the title of the video put some stretches of it are lost this one that I'm standing on now for instance this is part of the original Whitby and Pickering Railway and look no railway lines but how can this be your thinking surely the North Yorkshire Moors Railway runs all the way from Pickering to Whitby if there was a bit missing we notice but we wouldn't get to be for a start and you're right you're not wrong basically this is the result of a deviation that was done in the 19th century to make the line suitable for locomotives and to get away from the fact that there was one particular point in the line that was specifically designed around its horse-drawn Origins this is that story the incline at Beck Hall was Stevenson's stroke of Genius in a railway that passed through some of the hilliest terrain in the north this was the only incline that was actually needed on the route and in engineering such an incline he was building on the experience of generations of Tramway Builders at dealing with hills in this case he used a pulley system that had two trucks that contained water tanks one would be filled with water the other emptied and the full one would pull the empty one plus whatever train it was attached to up the incline to the top where it would then be attached to a fresh set of horses waiting at the top you might be pleased to know that the tired horses also caught a lift on the incline in a special truck called a Dandy cart it was a slow and clunky system however especially for the forward-thinking Hudson he was adamant that he wanted steam lurkers running the entire network however he wasn't to see a deviation built under his watch because in the late 1840s the news began to break of the many unvaried fraudulent activities he was involved in with his Railway companies including such great hits as paying dividends from his own pocket overvaluing shares in his new Ventures and selling land to his own companies that massively inflated prices instead the company installed a stationary steam engine at the top of the incline to replace the water truck system Hudson's exit left the York and North Midland Railway a broken indebted mess and by the 1850s an act of parliament was needed to force the remnants of Hudson's Empire to merge into one monolithic giant of a railway company the North Eastern Railway big though it was however it still spent much of its first decade paying off the fines and debts incurred under Hudson it wasn't until the 1860s that they started to look into modernizing an expansion at this incline was one of the things they looked at it wasn't a difficult Choice the incline had been a break in the railway for decades by this point and increasingly was a dangerous and unnecessary risk in the journey in 1861 the Rupert snapped whilst hauling a mineral train of the incline sending the train smashing at the bottom into another waiting train luckily the brakes man leaped off and there were no casualties but a few years later in 1864 a worse accident was to befall the incline when a passenger train headed for Whitby was being lowered down the hill when again the Rope snapped despite the guard desperately trying to lock the bricks it was an icy night and the wheels locked and simply slid down the rails at the bottom several carriages turned over killing two passengers an injuring 13. a far less fatal accident happened when a train full of Herring overturned after a break in the Rope allegedly leaving the village of gutland wreath in a fishy smell for weeks afterwards but help was at hand the northeastern Railway had already applied for an act of parliament in 1861 to lay a four-mile deviation around the incline allowing trains to run all the way through for the first time in the railway's 30-year history the process of building it certainly should why Stevenson hadn't considered the route himself because this four miles of track ended up costing the northeastern Railway 50 000 pounds or in modern money four and a half million and this was largely due to the huge engineering challenges including a cutting that had to be blasted out Seven Bridges built over the merck-esque and the ellerbeck when the deviation was finally completed the beck hole and Bank top halts were closed and a new station the one that still stands there to this day opened next door to girthland's Mill the old track was lifted and the route left to disappear into memory with just a few hints of its prior existence left around as clues for the passing traveler an Old Stone Bridge here a path that runs close to the railway there and of course the path along the incline itself which has been given its own information board to remind people of the railway's horse-drawn Origins now I love girthland station because it was built later than the others it's stylistically very very different to the ones that were designed by GT Andrews on the line it's got this kind of rustic feel about it all that roughest Stern really is meant to blend in with the other farm buildings in and around girthland and it does really well it kind of looks as if it's always been here and it really belongs when it was first built it was actually known as girthland Mill to dissociate it from the other station that was at the top of the incline but of course as this deviation became the main line and the other one fell out of use entirely this became just girthland station and that is what it remains to this day and I'm not sure it would be right of me to basically do a piece to camera here in a working Heritage railway station and not show you a steam engine [Music] as the line heads further south towards Pickering it stops at the little halt called lavisham the original halt was actually just a little to the north at a place called raindale Mill a place that was depicted by the artist George Dodson but was solidified into the more robust station of today when George Hudson took over the line in 1845 giving us another GT Andrews building although in this instance Andrews actually took an existing Farmhouse and adapted it into a station Master's house and that's the building that you see here today an 1840s renovation of a much older Farm building the signal box was a later Edition dating from 1876 which was the date of course that block signaling was introduced to the Whitby and Pickering line in order to improve safety and in that same year the toilets on the down platform were added for passengers just a few years later in 1880 the up platform waiting room was added by the northeastern Railway now if you've ever visited lewisham station from the road it may surprise you just how far from levisham it actually is having to travel down a long and very steep Road into the valley and whilst many rural stations end up being a short walk from The Villages they served for various reasons this does seem somewhat excessive and the fact that the station is closer to the Village of Newton than levisham is once again one of those unusual quirks of our world Railway system very likely the result of local landowner politics during the construction and planning of the route if you care to take a walk up the hill and along the valley overlooking the railway to the north you are rewarded not only with an exceptional view of both the trains and the Moors but also skelton's Tower a 19th century Folly built by levisham's Rector a man landowner the Reverend Robert Skelton around 1830 originally built as a shooting Lodge some stories suggested he wrote his sermons here whilst others suggested that the good Reverend came up to this remote spot to indulge in a spot of heavy drinking either way today it stands as a magnet to Walkers and you can't fault the Reverend for picking this spot whatever he used it for southwards the line plows on towards Pickering once the final stop of the line end today also the Terminus of the North Yorkshire Moore's Railway Pickering was chosen as the end point for the Whitby Railway due to its position as a market town at the heart of the surrounding Moors it's all trade in Limestone grain fruits and vegetables as well as many things made locally and in terms of connecting Whitby to the interior this existing trade and Road Network and the fact that the railway route here was the easiest route Inland from Whitby mid Pickering an excellent choice to be the other end of the line the original station was of course like the others more of a coaching in with rails than anything we would today recognize as a railway station this isn't the original Pickering station the original station as designed by Stevenson was a small Coach stop and it was also a Terminus because this is as far as the line went there was no such thing as a railway Network in the 1830s this station was actually built when the York or North Midland Railway took over and interestingly it was turned into a through station because George Hudson already earned and ran the railway from York to Scarborough which runs just a few miles south of here and he wanted to run this line all the way through and Junction at rillington with that line so you could get trains all the way from Whitby to York and that meant from Whitby to pretty much anywhere in the country and a few interesting facts about the station it's one of the few George Andrews stations that doesn't actually have the twin-legged chimney breasts and also it was built during a time before the principle of having raised platforms to get onto the carriages easier it was actually built when you actually hoisted yourself up from track level so these raised platforms are actually added by the northeastern Railway during the 1860s 1870s which meant that for a few years you had to go down steps to get into the station buildings like the waiting room and the cafe nice little bits of strange odd idiosyncrasies from the early Victorian Railway Edge now one thing I find really interesting about Pickering station is that it shares a lot of design characteristics with Whitby like for instance these finely cut ashlar blocks of sandstone but it's bereft of all the flourishes all the italianette features that make Whitby look so much more Posh it doesn't have any particles for instance and this is an interesting thing this is a much more workman-like station despite its very fine construction compared to most of the brick buildings on the routes it tells us something fascinating about the way in which Pickering and Whitby were viewed by GT Andrews and by the York and North Midland Railway clearly Whitby was the one you needed to impress Pickering not so much but nobody would ever in the right mind call Pickering a poor station it's a fantastic station and it's only because Whitby is a bit of an anomaly that it stands out has not been quite as nice if you put this in anywhere else it would still absolutely blow the competition away this is the sort of building you wouldn't expect to find somewhere like Pickering you'd expect to find the station much more like the one at for instance driffield but this is actually quite grand for what it is and again bespeaks what George Hudson wanted the railways to be and how he wanted them to come across big opulent comfortable with lots of money for investors because as we all know George Hudson liked his investors oh yes through the years the railway had a few owners the original Whitby and Pickering Railway the York and North Midland Railway the northeastern Railway which was the fused together Embers of Hudson's Empire of Railways the semi-nationalized London and Northeastern Railway that absorbed the ner in the 1920s and of course finally British Railways after nationalization in 1948. it was as British Railways that the profits and spending on Railways became a matter for political scrutiny posed as the need to see how public money was being spent it was often really used as a political football in the 1950s these political pressures started to affect the Whitby and Pickering line its fortunes never really recovered after the second world war and the rise of the motor car among the more well to do meant that its use for sightseers and holiday makers was lessening likewise whitby's jet boom had long since subsided and the local quarries were slowly winding down as the 20th century rolled on pressure was put on the line to trim down its excess spending the old end of the original beckhole incline route had been kept available as a siding for years but it was during this period that it withered and died the tracks being in too poor condition to use anymore and halts at the smaller stops that never had official stations like newtondale and farwith were stopped leaving those communities isolated particularly in the winter months as the 1960s came into view and the conservative Minister for transport Ernest marples a man who earned significant shares in his family's Road Building Company commissioned Dr Richard beeching to compile a report about how the railways could save money with an emphasis on closing lines that weren't making enough profit the beaching report was highly controversial listing many lines that were actually profitable such as the Beverly to York branch which provided a convenient quick route between Hull and York and whilst the Whitby and Pickering line was suffering during the week it still had booming business with crammed diesel multiple units running through the picturesque scenery at the weekends and over summer the government claimed that it was losing 50 000 pounds a year was disputed hard by several local councils along the Route it was a very real threat that Whitby which had become quite the Nexus of a whole host of small Railways to Scarborough Pickering in Middlesbrough would have not a single Railway line for the first time in 130 years the furore that erupted however particularly in a number of conservative constituencies forced the government to relent leaving the stretch of the Whitby and Pickering line that led to Grossmont and taking the route from Grossmont to Stockton for the rest of its length the line from Grossmont to Pickering however was to be closed in 1965 despite the vociferous local opposition along the Route when local councils failed to put together a subsidy package for the line it finally fell to the people of the region and some from Beyond who refused to accept the untimely demise of this Scenic Railway route that was still the lifeline to some of the small rural communities along its length after a meeting in 1967 the North Yorkshire Moors Railway preservation Society was created from among the attendees but time was fast running out British Rail were planning to lift the track and would only give the new Society six months to work out the financial details it soon became clear that the cost was going to be well over a hundred thousand pounds for the length of track from Pickering to Grossmont way outside the pockets of the new Society even though news of their efforts were spreading and support was exploding in numbers in the end after some hard haggling on both sides a price of just over 50 000 pounds was agreed upon for a length of Railway track from Grossmont to Ella Beck and the track bed alone with no rails from there to Pickering along with several Railway cottages and station buildings this was a start over the following years the rails were relayed all the way to Pickering by 1972 running rights were granted to the organization which had by now become a charitable trust finally in 1973 the Whitby and Pickering Railway so close to being lost forever like the other lines covered so far in this series was reborn as the North Yorkshire Rose Railway and became a legend in its own right initially running from Grossmont to Pickering making it at the time the longest Heritage Railway in Britain 2014 the occasional trips to Whitby became normal part of the running of the lion thanks to the railway gaining permanent running permission from Network rail for certain trains to run on their tracks the long close second platform at Whitby was reinstated and trains now carry people all the way to Whitby from Pickering once again Grossmont became the Beating Heart of the newly established Society it's here at the locomotive Depot that they constructed by the line side that would help rebuild and service the ever-growing fleet where an army of skilled and passionate volunteers would help Breathe new life into both these antique engines and the track that they ride on sidings were laid over the years so they could store the increasing number of locomotives and Rolling Stock that were rescued from scrap and another shed at Pickering grew rebuilding battered old coaches and trucks for the railway's use today the railway carries around 13 million passengers a year flooding Whitby Grossmont and girthland with day Trippers and business it's a railway Heritage success story and really thank goodness it was saved because the North Yorkshire mall is real where today gives thousands and thousands of people an opportunity to experience traveling on Legacy steam locomotives and all diesel trains and on these old lovely coaches that our grandparents used to go on and not only that it provides a Lifeline to many old locomotives that need restoration and somewhere to be renovated and that has got to be a happy ending for a lost Railway surely for one I'm glad to say foreign if you've enjoyed this video then please help me out by clicking the like button and if you'd like to see this sort of thing pop up on your YouTube feed more often don't forget to subscribe and click the Bell icon if you'd like to help me make more videos more often then please consider donating via GoFundMe or coffee or if you want to be a regular contributor join me on patreon all the links are in the description of the video below old donations help me with the travel research and gear costs that help make this channel possible thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Hull History Nerd

Views: 49,586

Keywords: NYMR, North Yorkshire Moors Railway, PIckering, Grosmont, Goathland, Whitby, Railway, stephenson, Hudson, Steam engine, preservation, heritage railway

Id: tUevP8ITPqw

Length: 40min 15sec (2415 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2022