The Great British Railfanning Trip: Tube Stock on the Isle of Wight

Frank writes...

Monday morning we left Hammersmith and headed to Waterloo Station, which is the busiest railway terminal in London. Our destination was the Isle of Wight, where on the "Island Line" they are still running electric cars built in 1938 for the London Underground. The reason is that when this line was electrified in 1967 (trains were steam-hauled before that year) they had to find equipment that would fit through a very confined tunnel in Ryde. New equipment was unaffordable and the only used cars that would fit were London tube cars. So they bought used "Standard Stock" built in the 1920s and ran those until about 1990, by which time they were practically falling apart from wear and rust.

It was at that point that they replaced the Standard tube cars with - what else - slightly less old tube cars. These cars were, as built, identical to the 38 Stock cars we saw at the London Transport Museum sites at Acton and Covent Garden; they were rebuilt somewhat when sent to the Isle of Wight, with interiors slightly modernized and the cars made into two-car motor-motor married pairs. It's enough to warm the heart of a Chicago 'L' fan. The 38 Stock cars are getting pretty worn out themselves, though, as is the entire Island Line infrastructure. The future of the system is uncertain because newer tube cars are too long to make it through the Ryde tunnel.

Anyway, Waterloo was about as impressive a show as I've ever seen on rails. We sat in our train at the end of the platform for a few minutes before departure time and there probably wasn't a span of 60 seconds without a train movement in or out of the station. Below, between two trains at the platform (the one on the right is ours), there are two trains moving in the distance alongside each other. Once we got going, it was about a 90-minute ride along old Southern tracks through bucolic southern England to Portsmouth, 750v DC traction all the way.

Portsmouth Harbour station provides what is practically a cross-platform transfer to the ferry boat that goes to the Isle of Wight. It's extremely convenient and within probably 10-15 minutes after getting off our train we were aboard the Wight Link ferry boat. The trip across the Solent to the Isle of Wight was beautiful; the weather, as it had been most of our trip, was gorgeous. We got a pretty nice view of HMS Warrior, shown below, which was the world's second warship built of iron. It beat the USS Monitor by a year or two, but of course Warrior was basically just a contemporary square-rigged screw frigate with iron replacing the wooden sides and was not as revolutionary as Ericsson's ship.

We also got to see HMS Queen Elizabeth, though we didn't know its name at the time and had to look it up afterwards. This aircraft carrier was just commissioned about six months previous and is the largest warship every built for the Royal Navy.

And before we knew it, we were across the Solent and disembarking at Ryde Pier Head on the north shore of the Isle of Wight. You thought this post was starting to get ship-heavy, but never fear, rail content is returning. See here: "Strictly no fishing from Railway premises." We should get Dave Diamond one of these signs.

Ryde Pier Head station, as its name implies, is out at the end of an impressive pier at the town of Ryde. In the old days, diminutive London Brighton & South Coast steam engines and short trains of mostly four-wheel coaches would travel out along the pier to the station, where they would meet the ferry boats. There was even a small electric tramway running alongside the steam railway to the beach, though that was abandoned in 1969 shortly after electrification of the Island Line. Today the tube cars still run right out onto the pier - probably part of the reason they rust out so badly.

Sure enough, our train arrived right on schedule: a pair of Metro-Cammel-built 38 Stock cars (technically BR Class 483, a designation they acquired in the 1980s when brought to the Isle of Wight) dating back roughly 80 years. These are the oldest cars still in revenue service on the regular British rail network. Our pair, 124-224, were built in 1939 as London Public Transport Board 10205 and 11205 respectively.

A peek in the cab while the train was stopped at Ryde Pier Head revealed that the cars are largely unchanged from when they were new. They still have the original air brakes and cam control with which they were built; in fact the use of cam control on the 38 Stock was one of the things that made it possible to dispense with the large equipment compartments on the Standard Stock they replaced. Note that everything is flipped compared with regular American practice; not only is the driver on the left but the brake stand is to the left of the controller.

The cars are definitely tired, there's no doubt, but the interiors are pretty well kept up. I assume they were fitted with fluorescent lights when they were rebuilt in the 1980s but I'm not certain. Note that a significant portion of the structure, notably the window post and sill structure, is varnished wood! As an aside, the chap in the white polo happened to see us on the train heading back to Ryde at the end of our visit and was pretty amused when we said we'd come to ride the Island Line. He pointed out that he'd been riding these exact same cars his entire life.

The cars have the hopper windows shown below, same as when they were new. The window frames are brass and lack a bottom rail; the stiles have a "nub" that keeps the glass from sliding out but that's about it. That must help a lot with the bottom of the sash catching water. Over the windows is a fancifully illustrated route map, and Greg pointed out that the route map on the other side of the car is different. It's a mirror image but drawn individually so the illustrations differ slightly. The cars never get wyed, so the the map always has Ryde Pier Head and Shanklin - the terminals - at the correct end of the car.

We departed Ryde Pier Head southbound towards Ryde Esplanade, which is the station for "downtown" Ryde and sits on the beach at the end of the pier. Going along the pier is really neat; there's a walkway and road, with the vehicles heading to or from the car ferry service that takes them to mainland England. Note the steel structure between the railway and the roadway; that's what used to carry the Ryde Pier Tramway. And I was sitting right over the cam control box, so if you listen closely right at the beginning of the video and again at about the 12 second mark you can hear the controller notching up.

After leaving Ryde Esplanade the train passes through the tunnel that's the source of the line's loading gauge woes and comes to a stop at Saint John's Road, which is where the shops are. After that it strikes out through the country. The following stop, which is seasonal only, is Smallbrook Junction. This is where passengers can get off the train and connect with a train on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. Never fear, we rode the IoWSR and that will be the focus of the next blog post. But for now we stayed on the train headed south towards Shanklin.

I would recommend a ride on the Island Line to absolutely anyone interested in traction. I'm not sure what the balancing speed of these cars is but I'd guess it's around 40mph. The track is jointed rail and seems pretty worn, so the ride is wild. Fortunately the seats are all very nicely padded and upholstered so it's not uncomfortable, but boy, there were times I was sure we were going to fly off the tracks! The video gives you a bit of an idea from the bouncing around everyone is doing. Oh, and yes, the guard roves the train to collect fares, all while the quiet countryside is passing by the windows. This has got to be the closest thing to an old-time interurban that I have ever ridden on a train that wasn't on some sort of heritage line.

Past Smallbrook Junction there are a few regular (non-seasonal) stops including Brading, Sandown, and Lake before you get to the terminus at Shanklin. In steam days this line continued past Shanklin through an impressive tunnel to Ventnor, on the south coast of the island, but due to low traffic (among other concerns) that end of the line was abandoned at the time of electrification. Shanklin is a small village on the southeast coast of the island with the railway station about a half a mile inland from, and out of sight of, the English Channel.

The entire line, end-to-end, is all of eight miles long and takes about 20 minutes to ride. What a neat anachronism.

While the train was stopped at Shanklin I got a photo of the interior of one of the cars without people in it. This can be compared with the interior photo of one of the 38 Stock cars at Acton that I took during our visit there; other than repainting, different moquette, and fluorescent lights, not much has changed.

The guard has this control panel at the interior end of the cars with various door control and PA system buttons. Note on the left side that he can monitor the brake cylinder pressure from a gauge that is still labeled LT for London Transport!

We rode the train back to Smallbrook Junction and got off there for our visit to the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. I got a nice shot of the train departing northbound towards Ryde.

As previously mentioned, I'll focus on our visit to the steam railway in my next post. Suffice to say we spent a few hours enjoying ourselves visiting that operation, which is on the alignment of one of the island's abandoned railway lines. The island had a whole network of railway lines up until the Beeching cuts in the 1960s but the Island Line is the only route still in service as part of the national rail network. By late afternoon, we had finished seeing the IoWSR and returned to Smallbrook Junction by steam train. The next train on the Island Line was southbound, so why not? We rode back to Shanklin and then traversed the length of the line again returning to Ryde Pier Head. En route I got this photo out the window of the original signal box at Brading, which has been restored.

And here's the yard at Saint John's Road. Originally nine married pairs of 38 Stock cars were sent to the island from London (plus a tenth for parts). Since they arrived in the late 1980s three pairs, plus the parts cars, have been scrapped to keep the remainder running while another pair is being cannibalized, leaving them with only five pairs on a line that requires three pairs for peak service. For newer cars this might be fine but with this old equipment it's supposedly a struggle keeping service levels up. But they had a set in the shop being repainted when we rode past so they're certainly putting work into these old cars. We rode the same set, 124-224, in the afternoon that we did in the morning; there was one other set in operation (that wasn't quite as rusty as 124-224!) but I didn't see what its numbers were.

Once we got back to Ryde Pier Head it was back to the ferry and back to Portsmouth. We walked over to the naval yard hoping to see HMS Victory but the yard had closed for the day and unfortunately they won't let you get anywhere near the ship if you don't have a ticket. Oh well. Our ride back to London was delayed because large sections of the rail network in the south of England that day seemed to be in meltdown. The primary reason was slow orders that had been imposed due to the scorching heat: in Fahrenheit it was 87 degrees out!! Yeah, we were a bit surprised at the marked effect this had on operations, but I suppose that's how the Russians would look at each other when Metra has problems when the temperature in Chicago drops below zero. By English standards it was awfully hot so there were many, many delayed trains. But we still got back to London in time to see Big Ben (albeit through scaffolding), Trafalgar Square, and have a rather nice pub dinner on our last evening in the UK.

Click here for Part X of our trip - the Isle of Wight Steam Railway.