All aboard for a return to that golden age of travel (From Worcester News)

All aboard for a return to that golden age of travel

9:43am Monday 15th June 2009 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

LOOKING back through rose-tinted glasses, if that’s wise wear in the vicinity of a smoke-belching locomotive, it’s easy to assume the so-called “golden age of steam” was just that. An era when trains chuffed across the rolling countryside with coaches full of passengers and on time, too.

But there’s a fly in the eye ointment, because this retro vision is almost certainly faulty. For example, Worcestershire’s time warp Severn Valley Railway is far more profitable in the harsh economic climate of the 21st century than ever it was in its Victorian heyday.

The original line was built between 1858 and 1862 from Hartlebury to Shrewsbury with a stretch from Bewdley to Kidderminster added in 1878. But according to railway buff Mike Hitches, the SVR was never a financial success.

He said: “Despite its role in local development, on average only four through passenger trains a day operated along the route, although freight traffic was important, particularly agricultural goods and coal from the colliery at Highley.”

Following nationalisation in 1948, passenger numbers fell away even more and in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s infamous “axe” fell on the SVR. However, in 1965 the Severn Valley Railway Society was formed with a view to preserving a part of the line running south from Bridgnorth. By 1984 it rolled into Kidderminster, its final destination.

Mike said: “The efforts of the preservation group have ensured the SVR remains in use and the superb line is a credit to its restorers, often featuring in television programmes and in films. In contrast to its Great Western Railway days the SVR is now a very profitable venture, just rewards for the efforts of the people who had enough vision to see the line’s potential as a preserved railway.”

OK, so who is Mike Hitches? Well, he is someone you would not necessarily expect to be singing the praises of today’s railways. He is a railway historian. He loves the romance of the railways as they were. When fine ladies in fashionable dresses waited at pagoda-style stations for chauffeurs to load leather trunks into the boots of shiny cars. School children home for the holidays ran down the platform to greet their parents, gentlemen tipped their hats to women and locomotives lived. They hissed and belched, they smelled of oil and smoke and they oozed shuddering power.

Much of that big beast awe was lost when diesel replaced steam in the early 1960s.The romance somehow seemed to go out of the railways.

They were functional rather than exciting and as a result passengers were rather less tolerant when they didn’t run on time.

But if you liked Worcestershire’s railways as they were, when trails of smoke rising into the sky marked a train’s progress across the county, when they stopped at villages like Bransford, Newland, Fernhill Heath and Eckington, or when the locomotives had romantic names like Cromwell’s Castle, which pulled the Cathedrals Express from Hereford to Worcester and on to London Paddington, or Trevor Hall, which chuffed into Foregate Street, Worcester, every morning bringing carriages full of schoolchildren from Malvern, Ledbury and all points west, you’ll love Mike Hitches book called simply Worcestershire Railways (The History Press, £14.99). It’s part of the series Britain’s Railways in Old Photographs and it is exactly what it says on the tin.

There are more than 100 pages of black and white photographs of life as it was in the steam age, complete with descriptive captions.

Mike said: “The theme of the book follows the growth of the railway system through Worcestershire and the railway companies involved.”

He now lives near Scarborough, Yorkshire, but was born and spent his childhood, “on the Worcester side of Birmingham” and as a lad was keen trainspotter on lines in the northern part of the county.

This book is one of a series of 11 he has produced about the UK’s railway history.

He said: “Back in the 1950s every young lad wanted to be a train driver. They’ve always fascinated me. I can remember when I was two years old getting my legs slapped by my mother because I kept going on about wanting a model train set.”

His book is a nostalgic trip back to the days when the massive loco nicknamed Big Bertha with its 10 huge driving wheels pulled trains up Lickey Bank, near Bromsgrove, or when growers from the Vale of Evesham loaded up their produce at Littleton and Badsey station.

They are days long gone – and much missed by many. Here’s a journey back to them.