The Leicester Gap: The Last Semaphore Signalling on the Midland Main Line

By Michael A. Vanns

Until 1987, there was still a busy stretch of British main line railway where traditional Victorian operating practices were used to control the movements of both express passenger and a variety of freight trains.At the heart of the former Midland Railway main line from St Pancras to Sheffield, the 45-mile section between Irchester in Northamptonshire and Loughborough in Nottinghamshire was equipped with semaphore signals worked from twenty-three mechanical signalboxes. It was the last main line in the country where this once-standard arrangement remained virtually unchanged since the days of steam. This pocket of mechanical signalling was christened The Leicester Gap, because Leicester was to be the site of a new power signalbox, the last in a chain of just five that would control the whole of the Midland Main Line into the twenty-first century.From 1984 when resignalling work started, to 1987 when it was completed, the author photographed as many trains passing through the Leicester Gap as he could. This book is the result of those efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781473878594

Michael A. Vanns

Michael Vanns was born in Newark-on-Trent in 1956. After studying history and history of art at Leicester University, and a short spell at Tamworth Castle Museum, Michael joined the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in 1978. He remained there until 2009, working on a variety of projects starting with the Elton Collection which examined the Industrial Revolution through contemporary prints, drawings and books. He was involved in museum education and in a number of large Heritage Lottery funded projects, including the refurbishment of the country’s best preserved Victorian decorative tileworks, and the recreation of a small town Victorian street.

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INTRODUCTION

So what was significant about the resignalling that took place on the Midland Main Line between Irchester and Loughborough in the 1980s? Why is it worth producing a book that reproduces photographs of the infrastructure and trains on that particular section of line? The importance was more than just what was being removed in that area. It was the disappearance of features that had once been common on all main line railways in this country. These key features were the way junctions between lines were laid out and how these lines were signalled using mechanical equipment to move points, semaphore and other signals, and the use of the block system, all this mechanical and electrical equipment under the control of signalmen working in signalboxes at the lineside.

1. Irchester South signalbox brought into use on 27 June 1897, was a typical MR structure. It became the fringe box to West Hampstead powerbox on 16/17 May 1981 also becoming at the same time the most southerly ex-MR mechanical signalbox on the Midland Main Line. It continued in that role until 5 December 1987, when its closure and that of the signalbox at Wellingborough station, Finedon Road, Wellingborough, Neilsons Sidings, Wellingborough, Kettering Junction, Kettering station and Glendon North Junction, marked the end of mechanical signalling on the former MR’s main line between Sheffield and London, St Pancras. This photograph was taken on Saturday, 28 November 1987 as the days were counted down. (courtesy David Ingham)

From the middle of the nineteenth century until the start of the First World War, the way track layouts were arranged and trains controlled from signalboxes had to conform to the Requirements of the Board of Trade, evolved and refined in that period and policed by the Railway Inspectorate of that government office.

Despite the variations in the design of equipment adopted by the many independent railway companies, due to the Requirements and various Railway Regulation Acts of Parliament, there was a basic uniformity in operating practices throughout the British Isles. The last stretch of main line where this Victorian legacy survived largely intact, was between Irchester and Loughborough and with its replacement a significant era in British railway history came to an end. Mainly through the lens of the author’s own camera this book analyses that legacy and how it developed and changed until it was swept away in 1987.

2. The interior of Leicester North signalbox photographed in the mid-1980s at a time when this type of working environment would have been familiar to signalmen all the way from Irchester South to Loughborough. Although the equipment seen here was barely thirty years old, the use of mechanical levers to work points and signals, and electrical instruments to communicate the state of the line between signalboxes, and the way it was all arranged, dated back to the 1870s. (author’s collection)

CHAPTER ONE

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROUTE OF THE LEICESTER GAP

Apart from its role in the story of signalling, the ‘Leicester Gap’ has no other historical significance. The section between Irchester in the south and Loughborough in the north formed just a small part of the Midland Main Line, named as such because it had been created by the Midland Railway (MR) as part of its trunk route between London, Sheffield, Leeds and Carlisle.

This main line had not been planned as a whole but evolved from, various at first, separately operated lines. The first of these to be completed was the responsibility of the Midland Counties Railway (MCR) who opened an isolated section of single track between Nottingham and Derby on 4 June 1839. By the following year the company had completed another line – this time double track – from a point almost midway between the two county towns (later to become Trent Junction) southwards through Leicester to a junction with the London & Birmingham Railway at Rugby. By this connection, passengers could travel by train between the Midlands and London, Euston Station. But from Derby, passengers already had another route they could choice to and from the capital that had opened on 12 August 1839 and was run by the Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway (B&DJR). Its line ran from Derby through Tamworth to another junction with the London & Birmingham Railway but this time at Hampton. In the first few years of operation, rivalry between the MCR and B&DJR drove fares down to such an extent that both companies came close to bankruptcy, only saved by their amalgamation on 10 May 1844 with the railway company that had operated the line north of Derby to Leeds since 1840. Thus the Midland Railway was born.

Over the next two decades, this ambitious new company sought to improve its connection to London by building new lines. All these new routes affected its existing main lines leading to the downgrading of certain sections and the creation of awkward junctions at Wigston, just south of Leicester and at Bedford. At the former the first of these new routes branched off close to the existing junction with the London & North Western Railway’s (LNWR) line to Nuneaton. The new line ran to Hitchin where a connection was formed with the Great Northern Railway (GNR). The line opened to goods on 4 May 1857 and for passengers four days later, but passenger trains continued to travel to and from Euston until an agreement was reached with the GNR that the MR could run through trains using its own engines all the way to and from King’s Cross. The first of these trains ran on 1 February 1858 after which the section of the former MCR main line from Wigston to Rugby was reduced to branch line status. Barely ten years later and the MR was poised to complete its own station in the capital – St Pancras, at the end of another new line this one leaving the Wigston-Hitchin line at Bedford where the re-arrangement of tracks created another unsatisfactory junction. Expresses began to run to and from St Pancras over the new route from 1 October 1868, after which the former main line section between Bedford and Hitchin was downgraded and then reduced to a single line in 1911 apart from the section between Southill and Shefford which remained double track.

The ‘Leicester Gap’, therefore, was formed of the Irchester-Wigston North Junction section, originally part of the MR’s new main line between Hitchin and Wigston North opened in 1857, and the Wigston North Junction–Loughborough section which once formed part of the MCR main line between Rugby and Trent Junction that was opened in 1840.

CHAPTER TWO

TRACK LAYOUTS

DOUBLE TRACK

The first very obvious change in operating practice after the new signalling in the ‘Leicester Gap’ was completed in 1987, was the overturning of the rule that trains travelling in the same direction were always run (except in special circumstances) on tracks not used by trains running in the opposite direction. [3] On the Midland Main Line in this area that meant trains going north were confined to either the down passenger, the down slow or the down goods lines, whilst those travelling south could only use the up passenger, up slow or up goods lines. (This, and related terminology is examined at the end of this chapter.) The special circumstances included, for example, when single-line working was necessary due to engineering work. The new signalling of 1986/87 was so arranged that trains could be run at any time if needed in either direction on any line – ‘bi-directional running’, a practice that was soon to become common on many other routes throughout the country as those lines were re-signalled.

3. Travelling in opposite directions, two HSTs pass each other adjacent to Leicester North signalbox on Wednesday, 28 May 1986. On the left is a Nottingham bound service accelerating northwards away from the camera on the down main line, whilst on the right a London, St Pancras service approaches on the up main line, slowing for its stop in Leicester station’s platform three. This is a very obvious example of ‘separation by direction’, with neither train travelling ‘wrong line’.

The principle of ‘separation by direction’ dated back to 1830 when the Liverpool & Manchester Railway had opened as a double track main line. At this time the electric telegraph was still in its embryonic stage and so there was no way to know where trains were once they had passed out of sight of stations on the route. It was sensible, therefore, given the anticipated amount of traffic to be worked between the two places, to minimise the possibility of collisions, by having two parallel lines dedicated to train movements in only one direction. Collisions between trains when moving in the same direction were likely to be less severe than head on impacts. When the electric telegraph became a practical means of communication in the following decade, there were advocates such as William Fothergill Cooke who argued that single track railways on which trains travelled in either direction could be efficiently and safely controlled by using the electric telegraph and special instruments. By then, however, the principle of ‘separation by direction’ had become the accepted configuration for all main lines. Inevitably, as this became the standard arrangement and as more lines were built and a national railway network began to emerge, all companies agreed that in the normal course of events, trains always ‘ran forward’ on the left-hand line, with trains ‘approaching’ on the opposite, ie right-hand set of tracks. The few exceptions there had been in the 1830s and 40s, had all been eliminated by the end of the 1850s.

As ‘separation by direction’ and ‘left-hand travel’ became established as the fundamental arrangements of double track main lines, ever more comprehensive rules and regulations were formulated based on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ directions of travel. If a north-bound train was travelling on the track designated for the use of south-bound trains, then it was ‘wrong road’. If unexpected, or unannounced, then that train was to be treated by any railway staff that witnessed it as a run-away. If, however, there was a legitimate reason for a train to travel in the ‘wrong’ direction, then special permission accompanied by special paperwork had to be obtained. Generations of stationmasters, signalmen, train crew and engineering staff, became well acquainted with the completion of ‘Wrong Line Order Forms’ during track maintenance or renewal, or when trains had to be manoeuvred around accidents.

QUADRUPLE TRACK

By the start of the 1860s, traffic carried between towns, cities, ports, collieries, ironworks and all manner of business that were taking advantage of direct rail connections, had increased enormously over the previous three decades. That combined with the growing difference in speed between passenger and goods trains was proving a serious challenge to railway managers. As the passenger trains got faster, goods trains, particularly coal trains, did not and, consequently, line capacity was being compromised. In the 1850s, the electric telegraph had given birth to the ‘block system’ (see Chapter 4) but it was still in its development stage and viewed with suspicion by many senior railway officers. Many considered it restricted train movements unnecessarily. Therefore, when they were faced with the best ways to increase the capacity of their main lines – an apparent choice between more effective signalling systems and laying extra track, they tended to choose the latter.

At first extra track on which goods trains could be separated from passenger trains was provided in the form of lay-by sidings. Although these sidings were laid parallel to the double track, access to them was never direct, trains always having to reverse into them through what were termed ‘trailing points’. [4] This configuration came about because of a general fear that the blades of ‘facing points’ – ie those that would allow direct access between lines, could not be relied upon to close properly, or remain closed, and a train could become derailed so blocking both main line and lay-by siding. Despite the introduction of effective facing point locks by the 1870s, the distrust of facing points lasted until the end of the century. In 1874 James Allport, General Manager of the MR said he ‘…would never have a facing point into a siding if it could possibly be avoided’. But lay-by sidings with trailing points involved risks of their own. Not only did the manoeuvre of reversing long goods trains into them take time, it could also precipitate serious accidents as was proved in the destructive one at Abbotts Ripton on the GNR main line in January 1876 when an express hit a goods train reversing into the lay-by siding there. Almost exactly two years later a similar accident happened at Loughborough when the wagon of a goods train reversing from the down main to the down siding became derailed, the approaching passenger train having insufficient braking power to stop in time to avoid hitting the stranded goods train.

4. At 14.50 on Thursday. 6 August 1987, 56 012 was photographed reversing its MGR coal train from Toton to Blue Circle Industries Ltd’s cement works at Northfleet, Kent (7O85) into the up sidings at Finedon Road, Wellingborough through the trailing points in the up goods line at that location. This manoeuvre was a legacy of the early days of railways in the 1840s and ‘50s when there was a justified fear of trains running through ‘facing points’ directly into sidings. In those decades it was not always possible to guarantee the blades of facing points would remain in the correct position when a train approached nor that they might not open as the train passed over, derailment, therefore, being the inevitable result. The Board of