The Great British Railfanning Trip: The Bluebell, Part I

Frank writes...

This is Part V of our recent trip to England, following Part IV here. This trip was the brainchild of Greg and Zach, who noticed that there were a couple of gala events at large heritage railways in England on the same weekend. The Saturday of our visit, 23rd June as they say in the UK, saw our first visit to one of these major attractions: The Bluebell Railway. The Bluebell is one of the largest and best-known heritage lines in England and, with its founding dating to 1959, is also among the oldest.

Our trip started at London Victoria, where we boarded a Southern electric MU train to East Grinstead. While we were walking down the platform, Zach suddenly noticed a familiar thunking sound coming from the train across the platform from ours.

Sure enough, it was a Westinghouse air compressor that would have looked - and sounded - right at home on a North Shore car! It turns out that these Class 455 EMU cars, which run on 750 volts DC as do all electrics on the Southern system, were built in the early 1980s but used recycled electric equipment from earlier 4-Sub EMU cars built in the 1940s. There are plans underway to replace the equipment with modern AC equipment but last year a capacitor failed in spectacular fashion on one of the upgraded trains, exploding and flinging debris a few hundred feet across the Guildford car park. So maybe these old Westinghouse pumps will stay around a little longer.

Anyway, in about an hour we were in East Grinstead, shown above with the Bluebell's train on the left side and EMU storage on the right. A brief primer on the Bluebell's geography, operations, and even history is in order. First of all, it's very different than any museum or tourist line in the U.S. in that it is spread out over 11 miles and four stations, with significant exhibits, equipment storage, and restoration work being performed at three of those stations. It's not like virtually every American railway museum where there's the main base and you take the train to the end of the line, turn around, and come back.

The stations are, from north to south: East Grinstead; Kingscote; Horsted Keynes; and Sheffield Park.

The only station with minimal facilities is East Grinstead, the north end, where the Bluebell has a more-or-less cross-platform interchange with the national rail network. Until 2013 the line stopped at Kingscote, but a monumental project to restore the original right-of-way to East Grinstead - which included excavation of a huge cut that had been filled with garbage during years of use as the town dump - reconnected the Bluebell with the rail network. Bearing that in mind, let's hop aboard the train!

We were visiting on Model Railway Weekend, so a heavy schedule of three trains was running. We hopped aboard the first one, which consisted of British Rail Mark I and late Southern era carriages. All of the cars were beautifully restored inside and out. We rode in 1951 Bulleid brake carriage 2526. It had an unusual design with an open saloon section (shown above), a couple of compartments, and a guard's compartment.

We got off the train at Kingscote, the first station south of East Grinstead and the station that was, for many years, the north end of the Bluebell.

The locomotive hauling the BR-era train was Southern 847, a beautifully restored Maunsell S15-class 4-6-0 built in 1936. Here it is pulling away from Kingscote with the southbound train.

And here's Kingscote. One of the remarkable things about lines like the Bluebell (and the West Somerset, and a dozen others) is that each of these stations - which in this case, at least, is the original station on its original site - tend to be maintained by their own group of volunteers. That is, there are some Bluebell volunteers who spend most of their time maintaining and working Kingscote and these volunteers may not make it down to the other stations along the line on a regular basis. The station is impeccably maintained and the flowers and landscaping are amazing - another feature hearkening back to the old days, when the stationmaster would often maintain flower gardens around the station.

On the Bluebell, like on the Great Central, each station has a different "target date" for its restoration. Kingscote is set in the early British Railways era, around 1950 give or take, and so we have here a portrait of His Majesty King George VI.

The attention to detail at the Bluebell, and the desire to really make the visitor feel like he or she has been transported back in time, is remarkable. Everything seems right for the time period and there are innumerable little touches like this luggage cart piled with luggage. 

This view of the platforms at Kingscote is looking north, with the station pictured earlier right over my left shoulder. The signal box is in the center on the far side of the right-of-way, with the original pedestrian underpass for access across the line. For years this was the north end of the Bluebell and the passing siding was used for the engine to run around its train. Today it's used as a meet location on heavy days. When our southbound train arrived and let us off, a northbound headed for East Grinstead was pulling out.

Just to the north of the station is a small goods yard where a few wagons were being restored by Bluebell volunteers. This is the original goods yard, of course.

One of the current restoration projects was this banana van, built in 1946 by the LMS. Banana vans were special two-axle wagons fitted for steam heat and with special ventilators so that they could carry - naturally - bananas.

At the north end of the platform is Kingscote signal box, shown here, which although similar to the original signal box once at this location was actually moved in from Brighton Upper Goods Yard. It has been fitted with a Westinghouse 'L' lever frame and is now used to control not only Kingscote but the line up to the north end at East Grinstead. Other attractions at Kingscote included a playground for children and a short 7-1/2" gauge (or something) railway which had been set up on the grass for Model Railway Weekend. We went for a quick ride behind a very nice live-steam tank engine but I neglected to get a photo of it; oh well. But hey, it's almost time for the southbound to arrive!

And here it is - a train of four matching varnished teak carriages behind a 1905 South Eastern & Chatham 0-4-4T in fully lined-out livery complete with gleaming polished brass dome. Does it get any better than this?

We piled into Metropolitan Railway 387, a compartment brake 3rd built in 1898, and rode the train to the next stop south: Horsted Keynes. When we jumped out I grabbed this shot of SE&CR 263. It's an H-class tank engine designed for suburban service and it spent 59 years in service before retirement in 1964. Its most recent overhaul was completed in 2012.

Horsted Keynes is one of the two most active stations on the Bluebell; in fact I believe it's the largest railway station on an active heritage line in Britain, with no fewer than five platforms. The reason the station was so large was that this was the junction between two lines; while the Lewes line (which now forms the Bluebell's main line) proceeds south from here, the Ardingly branch cuts off just south of Horsted Keynes and heads west-southwest to Haywards Heath. The Ardingly branch was still in use, and electrified no less, for the first year or so the Bluebell was in operation before it joined the Lewes line in abandonment. Today the Bluebell has purchased the Ardingly branch right-of-way in case it wants to restore that branch sometime in the future; in the meantime Horsted Keynes is a junction station without the junction. But the Bluebell has built up quite the network of yards and shop buildings around Horsted Keynes. The station building shown is a 1990s replica of the original, torn down in 1914. One of the real joys of our stop was the small cafe in the station building which served sausage rolls and real hand-pulled English ale.

Model Railway Weekend was visible everywhere at Horsted Keynes. There were vendors set up on the platforms hawking books and models while the station building held some beautifully detailed model railways. Model train shows are different in Britain than here; instead of the vast modular layouts common at U.S. train shows you tend to see small, painstakingly planned and detailed switching modules operated by a single person using authentic methods and often to a timetable based on what would have been seen at the prototype location. But I digress.

Only three of the platforms at Horsted Keynes are in active use and only two were in use during our visit; one of the outer platforms contains a carriage which serves as the Bluebell's used bookstore (sound familiar?) as well as some out-of-service equipment. Included in that count is this Southern Railway 2-6-0, Maunsell U-class 1638, which was built in 1931 at Ashford. This was a Barry locomotive and required a lot of work to make operational but it steamed for the first time in preservation in 2006. It is now out of ticket and awaiting another rebuild.

And next to it is this thing. At IRM, spam cans are CTA 6000s but in British rail parlance spam cans are considerably more interesting. The term refers (derisively, I suppose) to shrouded Bulleid Pacifics like this one, 21C123 "Blackmoor Vale," built in 1946. These distinctive locomotives were designed by Oliver Bulleid with a number of revolutionary features including a casing that could be sent through the Southern's wash racks and a chain-driven valve gear that was, shall we say, less than universally successful. This is a "West Country" class, one of a few outwardly similar classes of Bulleid 4-6-2.

The Bluebell has the largest collection of steam locomotives of any heritage line in Britain, second only to the National Railway Museum, and several of them were lined up on the track behind the U and the Pacific. Visible here are London & South Western 96 "Normandy," an 1893 B4-class "dock tank;" Southern B473, an 1898 0-6-2T "radial" suburban tank engine; South Eastern & Chatham 592, a C-class 0-6-0 built in 1902; and a locomotive from my personal favorite railway, Great Western "Dukedog" 4-4-0 9017 built in 1938 using components from much older locomotives. This is one of only two GWR 4-4-0s in existence, the other (of course) being "City of Truro" in York.

Near the Horsted Keynes station is the Bluebell's carriage restoration shop, which seemed quite large and well-equipped although it too was filled with model railway layouts and vendors so it was a bit hard to picture exactly how it was normally set up. In the middle was this four-wheel car undergoing a virtually frame-up restoration. It is London Brighton & South Coast 328, a Stroudley four-wheel 3rd built in 1890 and acquired as a deteriorated body. The scale of the rebuilding is remarkable.

On the other track was this Pullman car, 154, which is undergoing a rebuilding nearly as complete. This car was built in 1923 as a kitchen 3rd, later rebuilt as a parlour brake 3rd. After the end of Pullman service it saw use on such trains as the Devon Belle. Pullman cars in Britain can be pretty easily identified by their straight sides and, in this case, oval windows.

And outside the carriage shed, sitting in the pocket track, was this beautiful carriage. It is Southern Railway 3363, a "Birdcage" lavatory brake 3rd built in 1910 for the South Eastern & Chatham. The nickname comes from the distinctive cupola for the guard. This carriage was the subject of a major restoration effort that culminated in its return to service in 2011.

Don't touch that dial - the next down train to Sheffield Park is coming up and you won't want to miss it!

Click here for Part II of the Bluebell.