Firstly, apologies for the absence of any full update on our ‘current’ activities since our website first went live at the beginning of 2022. It’s taken longer than expected to assemble material, to edit it carefully, and to source illustrations and permissions to reproduce them. It’s a good job we didn’t call this the ‘News’ page and raise your expectations of frequent or regular news reports! We have in the meantime, however, been adding material to existing pages and creating new pages.
The main news is that the History page went live at the start of 2023 and contains several in-depth papers, many connected with the studies listed on this page. There are PDF links for each paper that allow you to open the full documents – some as published earlier elsewhere but with their own updates in the light of further research. A few date back as far as 2008 but have been left intact as published and simply extracted unaltered from the relevant journals.
We’ve recently added Colin Divall’s paper on the closure of the Somerset & Dorset line halts, first published in The S&D Telegraph in 2017, as well as Philip Brown’s paper on the mysterious Leonard’s Bridge goods station, which turned out to be the predecessor of West Moors Station from 1847 until the passenger station opening in 1867. This was first published as an Appendix to Philip’s revised and hugely enlarged edition (Autumn 2022) of his 2003 monograph for the South Western Circle, entitled Many and Great Inconveniences: The Level Crossings and Gatekeepers’ Cottages of the Southampton & Dorchester Railway.
We are deeply into some fresh historical studies that we should be publishing at intervals during 2023. These include looking at Wimborne Junction, 1859-1865, when there was rapid development of infrastructure and train services following the construction and opening of the Dorset Central Railway line to Blandford and, in 1863, connection with the emerging Somerset & Dorset Railway as far as Highbridge and Burnham. In particular, the locomotive depot at Wimborne Junction emerged during this period. Unravelling changes to its layout has proved intriguing and full of mysteries. This should be published initially in the Pines Express (journal of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust), before being added to our website.
A paper is also complete in March 2023 on the history of L&SWR Bridge 75 at Wimborne – passing over the Ringwood-Wimborne turnpike, later the A31 trunk road, and colloquially known as ‘Leigh Arch’. For many years the width and height restrictions were a significant hindrance to and safety issue for pedestrian and road traffic, until demolition in the mid-1970s. We expect this paper to appear in the South Western Circular in the summer, before being added to our History page.
Another paper to be re-published soon is Philip Brown’s study of the station building designs along the Southampton & Dorchester line through Wimborne, again updated partially and with a few new illustrations.
We are also uploading a series of three papers on the ‘Wimborne Cut-Off’ (Broadstone-Bailey Gate), published in recent issues of Pines Express, the magazine of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust. The first was written by Jonathan Edwards, and prompted two follow-up pieces by Peter Russell, using material gleaned from our researches.
The Home page is extending the menu at the top, with the addition of our second tranche of pages – History, Mapping, Operations, Photos, Modelling and Incidents. Only the History page is currently live, but work is advanced on starting material for Operations, Modelling and Photos, and these should be going live in Spring 2023. Given that these pages all contain historical material, they will appear in a drop-down sub-menu underneath History.
The Operations page kicks off with our efforts to assemble a typical weekday schedule of trains for Wimborne Station in 1960, i.e. ordinary passenger and goods services, but largely excluding holiday trains, excursions and other non-regular services that ran at weekends. This was, in its own right, a fascinating time in the railway’s life, albeit late on, but also a period that may form the basis of a new modelling venture.
The Photos page should be the next to go live, with an introduction to sources – national and local – and examples of images that are rare in terms of location, date, or subject matters. As a taster, we’ll include photo features on Wimborne and Broadstone stations in Summer 1969, when most infrastructure was still intact, as well as highlighting some much older rarities we’ve discovered that inform our research.
The Incidents page has yet to be started, although we’ve gathered considerable material on major accidents (including inspectors’ reports), derailments, minor incidents reported in regional newspapers, etc. There was plenty happening back then, especially in the early days when train controls were more primitive!
The Modelling page will feature efforts to model stations in our study area – so far all except Broadstone (unless someone out there is aware of such a model).
