CONTENTS

AUTHOR: Robin Jones rjones@mortons.co.uk

PAGE DESIGN: BookEmpress, London

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PRINTED BY: William Gibbons and Sons, Wolverhampton

ISBN: 978-1-911639-05-3

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COPYRIGHT: Mortons Media Group, 2020 All rights reserved.

All pictures marked * are published under a Creative Commons licence. Full details may be obtained at http:// creativecommons.org/licenses

Pictures credited CSRM are courtesy of the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum at Tenterden Town station.

Remembering Alma, who enjoyed her visits to Clevedon.

Colonel Holman Fred Stephens came at the opposite end of Britain’s great railway building era to the likes of Richard Trevithick, George and Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, yet was just as much a larger-than-life engineering expert in the field.

The colonel was renowned for establishing a burgeoning portfolio of cheaply-built light railways serving a variety of purposes at remote and obscure locations such as Selsey, Leysdown-on-Sea, Camber Sands, Snailbeach and Ashover Butts. The established railways of the day knew they could never profit from these routes.

Built under the auspices of the 1896 Light Railways Act, many of his lines sought to connect rural communities that would otherwise have remained disenfranchised in perpetuity from the national network – which already served the country’s cities, towns, industrial areas and ports, with no desire to explore the potential custom that remained in the shires.

Stephens used his engineering expertise and knack for finding cost-effective solutions to build local lines that could yet be made to pay – second-hand locomotives, carriages and wagons running at no more than 25mph from and to minimalist stations. While Stephens set out to serve very much the lower end of the market, his abilities were widely respected by senior figures in the rail industry of his day.

Benevolence to the inhabitants of remote and sparsely-populated areas was the outcome but by no means the intention; the colonel designed and built lines that were designed to turn in a profit.

They might have done just that had it not been for the dawn of the age of road motor transport, which broke around 75 years after the Stockton & Darlington Railway has become the world’s first public steam-operated line. The business cases of light railway schemes which looked watertight on paper were, within a decade of their opening, rendered full of holes thanks to road transport’s infinitely greater versatility and economy.

Furthermore, the loss of profits and the lack of government or local authority grant aid meant that there was no capacity for investment in repairs to cheaply-built basic infrastructure which in the longer term could not cope with the wear and tear from regular traffic.

Had Stephens’ light rail businesses mushroomed 20 years sooner, in an age where rail transport still held the upper hand unchallenged, many of his lines would surely have thrived. As it was, their demise heralded the decline of country branch lines from the 1930s onwards, paving the way for the rail cutbacks of the Fifties and Sixties onwards.

However, the colonel would have been surprised to discover that, decades later, light railways operating to the provisions of the 1896 Act would become sizeable players in the UK tourism market.

Several observers have called Stephens, a legendary figure by virtue of his rich and varied selection of short rural independent lines, the forerunner of today’s buoyant heritage railway sector, and if not its founding father, a major guiding light.

Yes, history shows that because of the advent of motor transport, his light railways may have come too late in the day despite his best intentions and those of his investors. Yet when you see the crowds flocking to today’s ‘preserved’ railways and heritage venues, Colonel Stephens looks, albeit unwittingly, to have been light years ahead of his time.

Installed on July 10, 2018, was the blue plaque in the booking hall at Tonbridge station which recalls Colonel Stephens’ journey by train from the town where his light rail ‘empire’ had its offices in Salford Terrace. The Colonel Stephens Society’s bid to have the plaque installed was supported by main line operator South Eastern Trains, Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council and the Kent & East Sussex Railway. COLONEL STEPHENS SOCIETY

One section of Colonel Stephens’ light railway portfolio is still in passenger-carrying service today at part of the national network. A First Great Western DMYU is seen crossing the spectacular Calstock viaduct above the River Tamar on the Gunnislake branch, the truncated remains of Stephen’s Callington branch which today forms part of the Tamar Valley Line. NICK LANSLEY*