A Branch Line Railway with John Betjeman Let's Imagine

BBC Four Collections -

archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this Collection, Gary Boyd-Hope

has selected programmes celebrating Britain's steam railway legacy.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

Evercreech Junction, Somerset.

It was to be the Clapham Junction of the west,

the place where one line branched away to Bath

and collared the Midland trade,

and the mainline ran to Highbridge and collared the coal from Cardiff.

That Pickwickian figure in the frightful hat

is, I'm sorry to say, me, talking to the station master.

But a station master's life - that's something worth living.

And you can see why Evercreech Junction

wins the prizes for flowers and tidiness.

The level crossing gates are worked from the signal box,

and here comes the 12.32 from Sturminster Newton

on her way to Bath, calling at Evercreech Junction,

change for Glastonbury, Shapwick and stations to Highbridge.

And as we say goodbye to the station master,

please notice that on expenses, I'm travelling first.

Forget motor cars, get rid of anxiety.

And here, to the rhythm of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway,

dream again that ambitious Victorian dream

which caused this long railway still to be running

through deepest, quietest, flattest, remotest, least spoiled Somerset.

This is the line we'll be travelling on.

Once it was part of a grand scheme to unite Wales and the South West,

and even to stretch to France. The scheme failed,

and the mainline went along there on the right

to Bath and the Midlands, and here's our own bit of line,

reduced to a branch,

and even that has lost its twigs to Wells and Bridgwater.

The Great Western was the first friend

the Somerset Central ever had,

and it's the Somerset Central Line we're travelling now.

It's rather a relief to be drawn by steam

through this uneventful countryside,

and just to hear the noises we knew as children.

It's the sad road to the sea.

West Pennard station, built of the local limestone.

One of the reasons why the Great Western liked this line

a century ago was because it was also broad gauge,

like the Great Western used to be.

Oh, by the way, there's Glastonbury Tor and how nice to see it

without a foreground of villas and petrol stations.

In a second or two, you'll find we come to a broad bridge

and as you look through it,

you can see how the track was once broad for broad gauge.

Glastonbury Station.

I suppose the promoters of the Somerset and Dorset

hoped that this place was going to become a vast industrial town.

STATION MASTER: Glastonbury. Glastonbury. Glastonbury.

JOHN: As the train, when it stops, waits here for two minutes,

I always like to get out and have a look.

There's always something to see in a railway station.

Let's have a look at the waiting room.

Gaslight...

..solid furniture,

Georgian tradition carried on into Victorian times.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

I say, I hope you're enjoying this journey as much as I am.

You really see much more country once you've got out

of the railway station from a train than ever you do from a motor car.

No hoardings, no road signs, no lorries in front of you,

and no neurotics hooting behind you.

This is Sedgemoor.

Do you remember Hardy's poem The Trampwoman's Tragedy?

It's written to a sort of railway metre and it fits here.

"From Wynyard's Gap the livelong day,

"The livelong day,

"We beat afoot the northward way

"We had travelled times before.

"The sun-blaze burning on our backs,

"Our shoulders sticking to our packs,

"By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks

"We skirted sad Sedge-Moor.

"For months we'd padded side by side,

"Ay, side by side

"Through the Great Forest, Blackmoor wide,

"And where the Parret ran.

"We'd faced the gusts on Mendip ridge,

"Had crossed the Yeo unhelped by bridge,

"Been stung by every Marshwood midge,

"I and my fancy-man."

This quiet part of Somerset has got its industries besides farming -

cutting withies for basket making

and the railway carries a lot of the peat which is cut on Sedgemoor.

The villages are a long way from the station.

This is the village of Shapwick, grey limestone.

I suppose they hoped there'd be houses

all along the road from the village to the station two miles off.

And at Edington Burtle,

they built a railway hotel by the station.

I suppose they thought you'd need a rest before the walk to the village.

Go away, you brute, you enemy of railways and comfortable travel.

You know, I'm not just being nostalgic and sentimental

and unpractical about railways.

Railways are bound to be used again.

They're not a thing of the past,

and it's heartbreaking to see them left to rot

and to see the fine men who served them all their lives

made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.

What's more, it's wrong in every way when we all of us know

that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish

on this overcrowded island and that in ten years from now,

there'll be three times as much traffic on English roads

as there is today.

What will the West Country be like then?

How will we get anywhere in summer except by a railway?

How will we see any country except from a train?

I think it's more than likely that we'll deeply regret the branch lines

we've torn up and the lines that we've let to go to rot.

I mean, even in America,

they're already building new suburban railway lines.

Here's Highbridge, the end of the passenger line

of the Somerset and Dorset, so I suppose I'd better get out.

The old Somerset Central Railway,

which later became the Somerset and Dorset Joint,

started here on its long journey to the English Channel in 1852.

And Highbridge is a piece of railway history.

It's also a railway contrast. TRAIN HORN BLARES

Come and see the older station - there it is,

with a diesel hurrying through it to the west

for Bridgwater and Exeter.

One of Brunel's original stations

with the broad eaves...

..and the cut stone for the doorways and the windows.

Now, cross over the bridge...

..and come and see

the slightly younger station -

Highbridge of the Somerset and Dorset Joint.

You see, Highbridge was the Crewe of the old Somerset and Dorset,

and there is the war memorial

to the Somerset and Dorset men who fell in the 1914 war...

..for this place was the headquarters of the line and I suppose

that's why it is that the seats are rather special cast iron.

If you want to see why it's the Crewe, come and look at the works.

There they are.

The turntable is still used for turning engines.

That's an old Midland engine made in Derby.

It used to turn that turntable, the blue S&D ones.

The Midland owned the line when the Somerset and Dorset was given up

and then the Great Western came on.

By the way, what's that?

Oh, yes, that's an old push and pull branch line GW car,

smashed by Teds from Highbridge.

Where did it go from, I wonder?

Between Dawlish Warren, Starcross and Exeter,

between Bourne End and Marlow,

or Castle Bower Park Halt and Ealing Broadway,

or was it on the Staines branch or the Uxbridge branch,

and I wonder what city gents planned their holidays

as they strap-hung and looked at these sepia photographs

and wondered where to go.

I can't tell you

because this car's now been smashed to bits since I was there.

People hate anything well made, you know.

It gives them a guilty conscience.

This was the carriage works.

And here they made the S&D coaches, I can just remember them.

Now let's go to the locoworks.

That little tank engine was made here at Highbridge

and given its royal blue livery.

This shed is still used for maintenance work...

..and there's a Great Western engine.

The western region still runs the line.

Oh, let's go inside this door if you can get in, yes.

I wonder what they kept here.

Neem oil for the lamps, coupling rods...

..or phosphor bronze?

Well, it was all part of the family life of a friendly little railway

of men who lived here in Highbridge in these brick terraces

in a faded Swindon, a forgotten Crewe.

I think you ought to see the goods side of the line.

There's still a lot of goods traffic

and that means the roads are that amount clearer.

CLANKING

CLANKING

And if we go on a goods train, we can take a look at Pylle

which was once a station and is now a halt,

and with no-one to look after it.

I doubt if there's a quieter, sadder sight in Somerset

than Pylle when the train has left and it sinks back to silence.

BIRDSONG

BIRDSONG

See the fringe of Sedgemoor from the footplate of a goods train.

The line is single track,

the driver hands a staff, which locks the points and signals, to a porter.

Now the track behind us is secure.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

You remember I told you that the Great Western

and the Somerset Central were friends a century ago

when the line we're travelling on was first built?

Well, now that we're coming in to Highbridge,

you can see an extraordinary survival of that long friendship

between two railways which were formerly broad gauge.

The Great Western -

there is its main line from Bristol to Exeter...

..running through Highbridge Great Western station and there,

right across that important main line, runs the little branch

to Highbridge Wharf and Burnham-on-Sea

of the Somerset and Dorset Joint.

The line is used for goods only now,

and we'll follow the goods train through the town of Highbridge

to its lonely end.

Regardless of roads and motor traffic,

we'll cross the town and come to Highbridge Wharf.

There it is - the place the Somerset and Dorset

hoped to establish as an enormous port.

Here were to be Welsh colliers from Cardiff and - who knows? -

perhaps Somerset colliers taking Somerset coal to Wales,

the rattle of cranes, the noise of shunting,

goods trains puffing with heavy loads of coal

for Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

This was to be the Barry of the South West.

Up here somewhere is where the colliers and cargo boats

were to unload.

The hope was partly realised.

That's what it's like now.

Highbridge Wharf, your hopes have died.

They flow like driftwood down the tide,

out, out into the open sea,

oh, sad forgotten S&D.

Let's not be too mournful.

There was still another hope of prosperity

for this part of the Somerset and Dorset Railway -

excursionists.

In 1858, the little line to Burnham was opened

and the station is still there.

Huge crowds were expected,

and it's worth looking at the station in some detail

as an untouched example of early railway architecture.

It's got a roof over it, like a big terminus.

I couldn't get into the waiting rooms and the booking hall

because they were locked.

But the Southern Railway,

which was one of the many companies that operated this line,

renamed the place Burnham-on-Sea in a hope to attract railway traffic.

The line still runs beyond the station out to meet the sea.

There was a pier at the end for steamship passengers

crossing the Bristol Channel.

Welsh people after a holiday in Bournemouth

could run merrily back to Wales, and vice-versa.

Now all that remains is this and the gradient going down to the sea.

The railway bought its own paddle steamer in 1884

and in 1905, the Barry railway in Wales ran steamer excursions

over here to Burnham - all gone, all gone.

Transport more than anything changes a place.

See how the railway changed Burnham.

First, the Railway Hotel,

then boarding houses of the 1880s, Bristol style,

built with railway prosperity,

and Victorian hotels on the seafront,

and slap-up buildings along the seafront of Victorian times.

Signs out to attract the motorist of today.

Villas for retired folk as permanent residences.

In the side roads, houses where gofers lived in the 1920s

and bungalows for our own age of the small car.

Burnham with its shining sands was a Georgian town

before the railway came. Let's have a look at it.

It's a beautiful seaside place.

The air on the sands and on the pier is like wine.

Burnham-on-Sea -

the Somerset and Dorset railway brought you prosperity a century ago.

Burnham-on-Sea -

in ten years' time, when the roads are so full of traffic,

we'll all be going by train again,

you'll be grateful you still have a railway to your town.

Don't let Dr Beeching take it away from you.