The Hundred of Hoo line
To continue with the history of the Hundred of Hoo Railway on to the Isle of Grain, the line was opened in 1882. It ran for eleven miles from Hoo Junction, around three miles east of Gravesend, across the Hoo Peninsula and over a creek on to the lonely and malaria-ridden Isle of Grain (the local authority continued to issue sprays to kill the mosquitoes until the 1960s). Opposed by Rochester Corporation, General Steam Navigation, oyster fishermen and, naturally, the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, sanction to build the line was obtained. The engineer was George Furness, who had been responsible for the construction of the West Somerset Railway. The line across the Isle of Grain was relatively level, but before that a gradient of 1 in 116 took the line to its highest point of over 100 feet on the chalk ridge on the peninsula. Stations at Cliffe and Shamal Street were opened in April 1882 and the goal of Port Victoria was reached in September of that year. A ferry service operated to Queenborough on the opposite bank of the Medway to connect with the Dutch steamers. At 40 miles from Victoria, Port Victoria should have had the advantage over Queenborough which was 52 miles from Charing Cross, but this was never fulfilled, probably because of the inconvenience of the extra ferry crossing.
Port Victoria
Sir Edward Watkin had big ideas for Port Victoria. The pier was intended to be temporary and the hotel that was built there was also intended as a stop-gap. His deep water dock was planned to have seven acres of open water with a depth of 25 feet attracting some traffic away from Tilbury and at the very least enticing the Zeeland Shipping Company’s Vlissingen ferry service away from rival LCDR’s Queenborough. Neither of these aspirations was realised and even as soon as 1885 some repairs were necessary to the pier. A fire damaged the hotel in 1900 and the pier was closed in 1916 as a result of more damage caused by the explosion at Sheerness of the pre-Dreadnoughf battleship HMS in 1914 with the loss of 741 men and HMS a requisitioned passenger ship in May
