John Norris Remembers
The railway figured very largely in John's early years in Swaffham Prior. This month, John tells us more and about how it was eventually dismantled.
IT WAS DURING THE DEMOLITION of the church porch that we found a broken pop
bottle with a message in it buried in the top of the wall. We were doing the
job because the best tender the P.C.C. could get was over £200, and that seemed
far too much. We completed the job in just one hour: it was all down hill, you
see. Anyway, to the bottle. When we got the paper out, it was found to be a
large yellow piece of paper advertising a play called The Fatal Wedding. On the
back was a reference to two children killed on the line, and a connection with
the Allix family: all very mysterious.
When the line was finally made redundant, the contractors pulled up the lines, which were sold, and most of the sleepers. We had two good loads of sleepers which would come in handy, indeed, many are sill piled up in Adventurer's Farm yard (1989). The demise of the very nice signal box was unceremonious, it was set on fire. There were only three levers inside the box, which elsewhere would have had dozens, and it could easily have been converted into a greenhouse. I still have several of the penalty signs which were screwed on the gates warning of the dire consequences of leaving them open!
After the track had been cleared away, the railway company decided to sell everything. The adjacent landowners had the first offer, so the estate mad a very advantageous acquisition. They later offered it to me. At that time, I had no use for the station and the two cottages, and suggested that John Hardiment might be interested. Indeed, he was, as his young son Henry had recently become engaged and would soon want a place to live. So it was that the station came into the Hardiment family for the sum of £3000.
Before I leave the railway I should mention the business we did hiring sacks. At the time of our arrival here, nearly all the wheat was sold in rail sacks. Huge things holding two and a quarter hundredweights and not at all easy to pick up. They were hired for the season, the hire charge being transferred to the next user when the grain was sold. At the end of the day a reconciliation had to be made: all lost ones paid for, and damage made good.
I am afraid that there was much wangling done to get a few "spares".
When they were collected from the square shed at the station, they were in
bundles of twenty, nineteen in one sack. The question of a good count was
vital, and preferential if we got too many! Mr Bettes did his best but without
being too greedy, we managed to keep a few spares. These sacks were filled out
of the grain store we built at Adventurer's Farm, as our combine was of a
later type that handled grain in bulk. Many of the local combines put the grain
into sacks on the machine, dropped them onto the ground to be picked up later
mostly by hand. Not a very good job at the end of the day when we were all very
tired. It is a pity that we do not have any rail sacks about today, especially
the old L.M.S ones, just as antiques.
Just before the close of the railway, the water supply was found to be polluted and a fresh supply in an old milk churn was delivered daily. I suppose the use of water was growing rapidly at this time, and being lower than the village, our sewage gravitated down to these cottages. After the alterations to the station, the main water supply was taken down to the station and later to Adventurer's farm.
To conclude this short resume of the railway activities, I suppose the final act was to remove the built up bank stretching out towards Cambridge. We decided to plough the land down towards the adjacent fields and try to level it out over a period. This has worked in the end, but for many years the old track did not grow very much. The raised length of the interline was carted away to form the base of the new factory at Burwell for Tillotsons. Looking back I think we too should have encouraged the contractors to have had our length.
As a postscript, there was a path leading from the station to Swaffham Bulbeck across the parkland, over the interline, and along Blackberry drove to the Cowbridge Road. I never saw anyone using the path, I suspect because the bridge over the water was not very safe. Indeed, we very soon removed it in order to improve the drainage of that area, and nobody seemed to mind or even know that it had gone.
When the railway was first built, the stream running through the park caused some very awkward areas to be created. These were removed by cutting a new dyke alongside the railway yard and filling in the old water course. Thus straight drive in turn caused some spare land next to the sidelines, and it was here Arthur Nash had an allotment. I suppose when it was originally laid out, it was very useful, but the beech trees have grown so large that very little grew there in the time I knew it. It is now part of the station garden.
Just one more thing! When we wanted to move one of the railway trucks, we developed a trick of using the trailer corner post and a length of joist to push the truck along. The station master had an iron bar, which if used with skill and determination could persuade a wagon to move, but what a chore! The lever was placed over the truck and under the wheel so that the movement moved the truck - but only an inch at a time.