OAKWOOD PRESS & VIDEO LIBRARY

The Suffolk town of Hadleigh, at one time famous for its clothing industry, was a political pawn on the chessboard of railway development in East Anglia. The Eastern Counties Railway, incorporated in 1836 to construct a line linking London with Yarmouth, had by 1843 only reached Colchester. Despite difficulty raising capital a northern extension was envisaged, linking up with the Norfolk Railway at Brandon, and with the Suffolk county town of Ipswich served by a branch line from Hadleigh. Businessmen at Ipswich were infuriated and promoted their own Eastern Union Railway, incorporated in 1844 to link Ipswich with Colchester. The ECR plans failed to materialise and the traders of Hadleigh were in a dilemma, their own town now isolated seven miles from the nearest railhead.

The solution came with the proposal for a nominally independent branch line to Bentley, but the railway was quickly absorbed by the EUR and the line was subsequently opened in September 1847. In the ensuing power politics the line was taken over by the ECR, and from 1862 became one of the many branches lines of the Great Eastern Railway.

The new company encouraged trade and passenger and goods traffic developed so that by 1901 there were plans to extend the line as a Light Railway from Hadleigh to Long Melford, there to join up with the Mark Teys to Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge cross country line. Unfortunately this scheme failed after World War I retrenchment came to the Hadleigh branch as local competitive bus services removed much of the passenger traffic from the line.

Despite the introduction of conductor guard working and rationalisation of operating methods and infrastructure, receipts continued to fall and passenger train services were withdrawn from the Hadleigh branch as early as February 1932. Freight traffic, however, continued to prosper accentuated during World War II by military consignments, but after hostilities the ever-encroaching motor lorry took much traffic from the line and the branch was closed in April 1965. Today the trackbed between Raydon Wood and Hadleigh can still be followed as part of the Hadleigh Railway Nature Trail.

The complex story of the scenic Hadleigh Branch is fully documented in the latest of Peter Paye's accounts of East Anglian branch lines.

The book is to A5 format, 208 pages with more than 170 photographs, line drawings and plans showing every aspect of the line.

Geoffrey Hilditch’s earliest childhood recollections involved his first ever visit to Halifax in 1931 when he watched as a steady procession of trams and buses passed. After dusk his attention was drawn to a series of lights slowly climbing up into the night sky. They came not from some vintage spacecraft but from a tram or bus making its way to Southowram against the pitch black backdrop of Beacon Hill.

In later years, he came to know the area rather better. The post-war aroma of Halifax bus exhaust was decidely off-putting, but in those later days when open staircase double-deckers were still to be seen in some quantity, he never imagined that in not too many years he would be professionally involved with Halifax Passenger Transport. That involvement began late in 1954 when he was appointed head of the Engineering Department.
 

He quickly discovered two things: firstly, the undertaking had a fascinating history and, secondly, things happened to passenger vehicles in and around Halifax that just did not seem to occur elsewhere.
 

When he returned to Halifax in 1963 as General Manager, he decided to try to piece the history together before it was too late, for the surviving records were sketchy and the number of men who had been involved in the early days were becoming ever fewer. It was hoped to produce something for the 70th anniversary but in the event time did not allow. Only now is publication possible after rather too many years of delayed effort. Halifax presented the transport engineer with a considerable challenge. It was always a source of some wonder how Messrs Escott and Spencer and their confrères with virtually no previous experience could bring a fully operational tramway system into being and then, with an equally unskilled staff, keep it operational.

For the drivers and conductors there was no sick pay, few holidays and long hours. Just how long those hours must have seemed to the driver of an open-fronted car on, say, the Queensbury route who for nine hours at a stretch might have had to brave arctic-like conditions in mid-winter with poor protective clothing can now be hardly imagined. But, in addition to needing stamina, such men also needed a high degree of physical strength for those trams, which weighed up to seven or eight tons laden, were stopped on average five to six times a mile by hand brakes that required more than a little effort to apply. This book is dedicated to those men who served their townsfolk so well, for they deserve to be remembered.

This book is lavishly produced and is to A5 format, 336 pages, 220 illustrations, casebound with a gold-blocked spine with printed endpapers and a laminated dustjacket.

A new and enlarged edition of this title which was first published in 2002. This appalling accident took place on 8th October, 1952, 112 people were killed and 167 passengers were taken to hospital for treatment, making it the second most serious railway accident in the United Kingdom. It came about when the overnight sleeping car train from Perth to London Euston in patchy fog overran the signals and collided with the rear of a crowded local train from Tring to Euston standing in Harrow & Wealdstone station. This had no sooner happened, when a double-headed express passenger train from Euston to Liverpool and Manchester ploughed into the wreckage. Rather than concentrate on the causes of, and steps taken following the accident to avoid recurrence, this work also looks at the huge task of mounting the rescue operation, managing the disruption to railway operations and clearing up the aftermath.

The response of the police; fire and ambulance service; civil defence teams; local community and voluntary organisations; national and local press; churches; as well as the railway authorities are considered, together with the help given by and lessons learnt from our allies in the form of the medical teams from the United States Air Force.

The book is to A5 format, 128 pages with over 60 illustrations, it has a laminated card cover with square-backed spine.