John Heaton FCILT marks our 125th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of five famous railway climbs – high tea and lashings of ginger beer optional.
A STEAM-hauled train approaches a station at the foot of a gradient – let us say Tebay, in Cumbria – with a Class 7 loco, going well. What is its load? Will it stop to accept the attentions of the waiting ‘banker’, or will it rise to the challenge of continuing unaided? If we were not lucky enough to have savoured such scenes live, the wealth of recorded footage on digital media now lets us experience them vicariously from our armchairs, instead of an often windswept lineside.
Surmounting railway gradients has been the staple diet of performance articles in The Railway Magazine throughout its history, so this topic was a natural choice for the 125th anniversary edition, meeting the remit to reflect the geographical and chronological scope of ‘our’ magazine. I have arbitrarily selected one major climb from each of the British Rail Regions, perhaps perversely deciding to ignore prime candidates such as the Lickey (covered recently) and Drumochter (of which more next month).
By necessity of space, this survey can form no more than a series of glimpses over the decades. Wherever possible, I have tried to avoid parroting familiar logs from past RMs, but it has been occasionally unavoidable as there are very few undiscovered pre-First World War unpublished private collections to be raided. Most of the runs used have been kindly made available from the Railway Performance Society (RPS) electronic archive.
Two of the chosen gradients are in Devon, which is perhaps counter-intuitive as one might expect a bias to the North. However, one of the most evocative phrases in the lexicon of railway jargon is ‘the Devon Banks’ – a series of fierce ascents in the 32 miles between Newton Abbot and Plymouth, skirting the foothills of Dartmoor, and sometimes erroneously including Somerset’s westbound 1-in-80 to Whiteball tunnel.
Up from Plymouth
The eastbound challenges
