Lincolnshire Potato Railways
| Lincolnshire Potato Tracks | |
|---|---|
 Potato Railway at Vine House Farm, Deeping St. Nicholas
| |
| Route length: | 48 km |
| Gauge : | 597 mm ( narrow gauge ) |
The Lincolnshire Potato Railways ( German Lincolnshire potato railways ) were a privately operated light rail network with a gauge of 597 mm (1 foot 11½ inches ) in Lincolnshire , England , with which the harvested potatoes could be brought from the fields to the nearest standard-gauge loading siding.
Essential attachments
There were two main potato railways : one at Nocton village (the Nocton Estate Light Railway ) south of Lincoln , near Nocton and Dunston stations, and the other north of Holbeach in the south of the county at Fleet and Sutton Bridge stations . There were also other smaller facilities in Lincolnshire such as B. at Deeping St. Nicholas .
history
The company W. Dennis & Sons owned large estates in Nocton (8,000 acres ), Deeping St. Nicholas (2,000 acres) and Kirton (2,000 acres). The farm manager for the Dennis family was Major Leonard "Jock" Webber. He was the manager of all farms in the Nocton area. His father Henry Webber was a stockbroker and head of the Burstow Hunt . At the age of 67, he was arguably the oldest soldier to fall in World War I, which inspired his son to buy a light railroad from army stocks in Arras, France , the tracks of which had been used for supplies during the First World War.
The first 6.5 km of the light rail track was laid at Nocton in the Fenland east of Wasp's Nest . After 1926 the light railroad was extended to a siding on the standard gauge railway line from Lincoln to Sleaford . Because of the heavy use of locomotives, the track weighed 10 kilograms per meter (20 pounds per yard).
During the height of rail operations, there were 37 km of single-track tracks on the Norton Estate alone and a total of over 48 km. Almost every field of the large estates could be reached, so that the harvest could be loaded directly onto trucks. The manor's workshops, a mill, a greenhouse, and a locomotive shed stood on the stump track at the old Nocton and Dunston station . There was a dock for reloading the agricultural products into standard gauge wagons that were placed on a siding on the main Lincoln-Sleaford line.
Route
At the mill there was a large map of the fields with a route plan on a board covered with green billiard cloth. Each field was numbered, and the numbers of all the carts could be pinned to it. The trips were organized by a dispatcher .
After the Bardney Beet sugar factory went into operation in 1927 , the sugar beets were brought to a beet store by light rail, from where they were transported across the River Witham in a claw of a gantry crane.
The main customer was the potato chip maker Smith’s Potato Crisps , and that company eventually bought the land from W. Dennis & Sons in 1936. At peak times, 220 workhorses were used and there were 1,000 cattle, 3,000 pigs and 2,000 sheep. In 1948, 24 tractors were purchased and in 1951 there were already 32. In 1955 the estate produced 17,000 tonnes of various products per year, but since the Second World War the transport has increasingly been taken over by articulated lorries, as the rural roads had already been made stable enough to carry goods by road. Around 1960 almost all fields were accessible by road, which led to the closure of the potato railways.
Shutdown
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All potato railways were closed in 1969 after the operation was increasingly carried out with trucks. Some Norton locomotives, lorries and wagons have been preserved and can be viewed on the Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway at Skegness .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Nocton Estate - The Lincolnshire Potato Railways
- ^ Squires, Stewart E. The Lincolnshire potato railways . Oakwood Press, 1987, ISBN 0-85361-352-4
- ^ Nocton in Lincolnshire , 2007, http://nocton.blogspot.com/2007/05/nocton-estate-lincolnshire-potato.html
- ↑ Sutton Bridge: the potato railways , 2006, Available from: http://www.suttonbridge.eshire.net/blank_3.html ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Potato railway at Vine House Farm , 2006, Available from: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/281360
- ↑ Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway , 2009, Available from: http://www.lincolnshire-coast-light-railway.co.uk/ ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 53 ° 9 '12.6 " N , 0 ° 25' 9.4" W.