The Golden Age of Steam

How did you first become interested in the railways of Warwickshire?

I am of the age when most little boys wanted to be an engine driver when they grew up because steam engines had a magic aura about them. In the days before computers and when parents encouraged their children to be out of the house, train spotting was almost an everyday hobby.

At school I won a prize and I had chosen the Railway Observer book of Locomotives, which listed the number of every engine still in service with British Railways.

Trains were part of everyday life and even if you did not see them you heard them with their whistling, the blast of the engines’ chimneys when working hard and the clickety clicks of the carriages as they travelled at speed over the sections of rails. I lived near Tile Hill station where I would spend hour upon hour waiting for trains and placing half-pennies on the lines so the trains would squash them so flat that you were left with a polished disc twice the size with markings left at all. (Ed: Don't try this at home!)

When I was about 30-years-old, I had a son and when he was five or six I thought I would buy him a train set. This wet my appetite and I joined Coventry Model Railway Club where soon I was involved in helping them put together their exhibition programme, which involved recording some details of the local railway scene.

I made the common mistake most railway modellers do by being too ambitious and I never got the past stage of building the baseboard and laying some track. However I had realised that I had awaken my interest in history and was soon giving lectures to local societies based on my collection and exhibiting my photographs of Coventry station and other locations at exhibitions.

My son was a web designer and for my combined birthday and Christmas present he designed and built the framework of the site. After that it’s as they say history.

Is there an area of the Warwickshire network that you have particular interest in and why?

My memories are very closely related to Tile Hill station, although I did go train spotting in Birmingham New Street which to me was like travelling to another country. I can remember the constant flow of trains in and out of the station, the smoke billowing out of the tunnels at either end, the taste of sulphur and the grit that would get in to your eyes.

Tile Hill station was very different - it had the charm of a country station, but was a busy line too, which kept things interesting. I can remember the porter opening up baskets of racing pigeons at a given time recording on a form the exact time they departed. The ‘bobbies’ in the signal box (all signalmen were called bobbies because prior to signal boxes the trains were first controlled by railway policemen) could sometimes be friendly and would invite you up in to their box to watch them pull the levers and swing the wheel that closed the gates.

On one occassion the local bobby was too quick closing the gate on a local passenger train and the gates swung into the buffers of the rear coach and got hooked up and were consequently smashed. To us kids it was great fun, but I am sure the bobby went home with a flea in his ears from his bosses.

Leamington station: Mike Musson's website

Rugby was another Mecca in that from the middle of the 1950's it had lines of condemned engines waiting to be towed away to the scrap heap. The station had the advantage in that it was a junction of several routes so you could see trains from many parts of the country arriving and departing.

The best place to train spot was near the ‘birdcage’ bridge which carried the old Great Central over the West Coast railway.

Your website contains a vast amount of information about the rail network’s history – are there any sections of the network that are still a mystery?

It wasn’t until I started the website that I realised just how large the county was and how many stations were once within the county’s boundaries.

The City of Birmingham was part of the county up until 1972 and previously when it enlarged its borders; it brought in stations once in Staffordshire and Worcestershire. It’s hard to Its hard to believe that Great Barr (now named Hamstead) on the Walsall line was in the county, as was Barnt Green to the southwest of Birmingham.

All of these Birmingham stations, except New Street, are unknown to me which makes it more difficult to write about them. The same goes for the Great Western lines of running in to Snow Hill – a station I never visited.

My biggest disappointment must be the Coventry to Nuneaton line, which being local, I should have well covered. However I only have a few photographs and many are poor quality being copies of originals.

What were the main stations in Warwickshire that were closed by Beeching?

It would almost be easier to ask what stations remained opened. The Stratford Midland Junction Railway was closed for its entire length including within the county the Fenny Compton to Broom section.

The Midland region lines from Rugby to Leicester, Rugby to Market Harborough, Rugby to Leamington as well as the old Great Central line. Whilst the Trent Valley route remained open most of the intermediate stations to Tamworth were closed, whilst on the Western region, stations south of Leamington to Banbury were also causalities.

Apparently there was a line that led to the Coventry Cotton Mill – could you tell us a bit more about that?

My friend Reg Kimber wrote the following about the line for my website following research that he undertook at the Local Studies centre: The short branch line ran from a point near the Coventry end of Daimler Halt to the Coventry Cotton Mill, which was situated next to the Coventry Canal and which opened in 1861.

The Cotton Mill employed 400 people, but was destroyed by fire in 1890, never to re-open. By 1896 the building was occupied by the Great Horseless Carriage Co and it was, in fact, the birthplace of the motor industry in Coventry.

The branch was therefore known at various times as the Coventry Cotton Mill branch, the Widdington Branch (the Rev. S H Widdington, vicar of St. Michael's was mainly responsible for financing the mill to provide work for people redundant from the declining ribbon trade), the Motor Mills branch and the Daimler Works branch, was in use and worked by the LNWR locomotives until the First World War.

A train at Rugby station: Mike Musson's website

In fact, the track was probably lifted shortly before Daimler Halt was built. The line crossed Sandy Lane by a level crossing. The crossing keeper's cottage still stands in Sandy Lane. There is a photograph on my website of a train passing near the old junction.

Some of the famous Spon End arches collapsed in 1857 – Do you know why and how that happened?

Believe it or not, I have seen a photograph of the collapsed bridge, which from memory was from the Daily Graphic – I saw it some thirty years ago at the Local Studies centre – although the photograph was very poor in quality and was just a picture of a man standing on a heap of rubble

The article described that one night locals heard a great rumbling and crashing noise and when they went out they found that most of the arches had collapsed. The problem was due to a mixture of poor workmanship and poor materials – the stone being locally quarried.

The stone columns were apparently built as a shell and filled with rubble and therefore they had no substantive strength. Some of the original structure remains today whilst the majority have been replaced by a blue brick structure.

The headline in the paper, Rotten Bridges and High Fares, would have a resonance with today’s railway traveller and was in the plural because on 11 June 1861, another bridge collapsed at Leek Wooten. The photographs of the latter accident are, I believe, the earliest ever taken of a railway accident in the world and can be seen on my website.

There is lots of talk about a new station at Kenilworth and possibly re-opening a line near the Ricoh stadium. Can you see this happening?

It’s possible that Kenilworth will reopen but not on its original site as housing has now been built on with the site. It would have to be outside the town with easy access and space for a car park.

As far as the Ricoh stadium is concerned, I do not know enough about the immediate area. However, as with Kenilworth, if there is the industry in the area or housing then again the economics might warrant the building of a new station.

Why did the station at Leamington have so many names?

The station concerned is not the station that survives today. It was built by the fledgling London North Western Railway (LNWR) at Milverton on the Rugby Road and was the original terminus of the branch line opened on 6 December 1844 and was given the name Leamington.

The name changes reflected the compromise of the original developers in an attempt to build the line on the cheap. In 1844, Leamington was expanding fast and becoming the Spa of choice for early Victorians.

However Warwick was the seat of the county and politically more important. The LNWR’s solution was a compromise so that instead of building a line that ran to both towns they positioned a terminus midway between the two towns which frankly was of limited value to citizens of either town.

With the opening of the Great Western Railway’s station at Leamington the LNWR extended the line to a new station at Leamington, which was named Leamington (later renamed Leamington Avenue) whilst the original station at Milverton (which was rebuilt some 100 yards towards Leamington) became Warwick (Milverton) and was subject to seven further name changes during its life. Over its life it was named Leamington, Warwick, Warwick (Milverton), Leamington (Milverton), Leamington Milverton (Warwick) and Milverton for (Warwick) and finally Leamington Spa (Milverton) for Warwick.

Incidentally, the station at Milverton impacted upon the operating procedures of the railway right up to the end of steam. The station was in fact timetabled to be the start and end of all the journeys to both Rugby and Nuneaton and not its more important neighbour Leamington Avenue. This was probably because the LNWR’s engine shed was built at Milverton and therefore both engines and crew would be booked on and off at the station.

Find out more about the railways of Warwickshire by visiting Mike's website: