Every month Jeremy kindly personally writes a new episode for thisisholbech.co.uk. This month we present...

Sponsered by 'A Neat Little Town' by Jeremy Satherley.

1. Episode 1 - Holbeach History
2. Episode 2 - No more leaves on the line, at Holbeach Station
3. Episode 3 - Shall We Dance - for 12 hours non-stop?
4. Episode 4 - Keeping the wheels of Holbeach turning
5. Episode 5 - The Holbeach card players

Episode 2 - No more leaves on the line, at Holbeach Station

Although 'The railroad runs through the middle of the house' was a popular song way back in the mid-50s, it's a situation you could apply directly to the area around Holbeach Station today - in spirit at least.

Stand in what was the station approach - Lefley's garage forecourt - looking diagonally across the road, and you'll see what I mean. The bungalow, at the junction of Barrington Gate, Fen Road and Station Street, and built long after the line closed 40 years ago, would have sat directly on the line into the station platforms. Soon however, we may be left with even less of a tangible reference point, if the station building disappears in the cause of residential development.

It's hard to imagine now, walking among the weeds and buddleia sprouting from weathered brickwork, what a hub of activity Holbeach Station represented, in its role of key distribution centre for the area's newly emerging and fast-developing specialised agricultural industry of potato and bulb-growing.

You could almost say they grew up together, with the railway even slightly ahead of the game. For as early as August 1858, the Norwich & Spalding Railway, as it was grandly known, arrived in Holbeach from Spalding, thanks to the considerable efforts of John Chevalier Cobbold, Edward Stillingfleet Cayley, Adderley Howard, Richard Peele and Holbeach farmer Thomas Edward Savage, all of whom had raised the necessary capital locally and from London. The first train, a goods, arrived on 9th August carrying a substantial amount of flour and some 60 tons of coal which was promptly sold off at 15/6 (78p) a ton. The event was marked by a musical parade, bells tolling and the burning of barrels of tar outside the Market House in Church Street (where the present toilets and Drydens are situated), and there were further celebrations when the first passenger train arrived two months later, on 15th November, characterised by a junket providing tea and plum cake for 250 'poor women, widows and wives,' not to mention 'jolly good beer and strong' and a 'good dinner' for the linesmen.

Although more or less on the present site, the original station and platforms were smaller than they appear today. In fact they were criticised by the local press for their 'abominable fencing', mean-looking approach and the fact that the platforms were too narrow for ladies in flared crinolines to stand there in safety.

After a shaky start, mainly through some shareholders not meeting their obligations and the sale of shares themselves proving problematic, it soon became obvious that the original four trains a day each way to and from Holbeach were proving inadequate, with overcrowding, Indian-style, occurring with passengers even riding on the engine for the 25-minute ride to Spalding.

Fortunately, essential expansion was spurred on by the Holbeach to Sutton Bridge link, completed by July 1862, and the Act of July 1865, under which the Great Northern and Midland Railway was to pay the Norwich & Spalding Railway a minimum rent of £7,000 a year for use of the line, which placed matters on a surer footing. By this time, too, Holbeach was soon to become part of a network extending from the other side of Bourne at Essendine in one direction (and on the main GN route to King's Cross) to Lynn in the other, complemented by a second link with the London line at Peterborough that connected with Sutton Bridge via Wisbech. To cope with the additional traffic this implied, alterations were eventually carried out at Holbeach in 1889 to double the track through the station and add another platform on the opposite side, while the original structure was widened to a safer width. Thus an important network had now come to fruition. Beginning with an amalgamation with the Midland & Eastern in 1877, what had started out as the Norwich & Spalding Railway became part of the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway in June 1893.

At long last, holidaymakers from Holbeach could now travel from their doorstep to the Norfolk coast, a facility for which they had waited 29 years. But instead of leaves on the line, the reason for the delay had been a more plausible one of engineering difficulties, local conflict and officialdom.

The Midland & Great Northern Railway was an enterprising and self-sufficient concern. It had offices in King's Lynn, an engineering works in Melton Constable and ran a smart service. Indeed, Holbeach station in its earlier M & GN days at the turn of the last century would have been a busy and colourful place. The locomotives were finished in what was described as 'Golden Gorse', a colour chosen by the chief engineer's wife as representing the gorse growing on Norfolk heathland - through which many of the trains passed before reaching Lincolnshire- and the carriages were painted in a grain-effect brown to represent teak, picked out in gold lining. All goods wagons carried a distinctive, brick-red livery, with M & GN lettering in white, with black ironwork. Later on the loco livery changed to dark brown, which was often mistaken for black once it became grimy!

Apart from anything else, the station had to act as an adequate depot for the town's fuel supply in pre-electricity days. White's 1882 Directory reflected new storage and distribution methods taking effect. Coal had been highly publicised as one of the first commodities to reach Holbeach by rail in 1858 and three coal merchants, Thomas Clarke (who lived in Stukeley Hall), H Cox and J and W Ridlington had since availed themselves of this newer transport medium by taking space in the railway station yard, as a means of improving stocks and delivery schedules.

A major user was the Holbeach Gas & Coke Company. Its advertisement of June 1894, drafted by Thomas C Willders (from where Willders Garth gets its name), invited tenders 'for the supply of 400 tons of gas coal (Railway Weight), to be delivered at Holbeach Railway Station at the following times, namely: 150 tons by the end of July next, 150 tons by the end of September next, and the remainder in January next.'

It was not surprising then, that fairly extensive sidings became necessary to cope with the heavy and varied goods traffic. Certain of these track sections were even named after regular users of the railway's facilities, such as 'Clarke and Grey' (coal merchants), Boston Coal Company, the obscurely-named 'Alice' (capable of holding 22 wagons), or most amusingly, 'Jumbo', a stretch of line into which a visiting circus train would be shunted, to unload the animals and equipment from as many as 18 wagons. Rolling stock was administered with strict instructions that each goods wagon was to be allowed 6½ yards of siding space.

Young cattle were brought in from the Midlands for transitional fattening and return, but above all the station became an important handling centre for locally-grown potatoes, flowers and fruit.

Before the First World War, bulbs had been imported from the Netherlands via Lynn Docks, but as home production increased, special trains were introduced onto the Spalding line and Holbeach achieved record levels for flower loading, especially in the early months of the year. Up to 45 vans a day were filled with daffodils, narcissi, hyacinths and tulips, part of a workload which, when combined with other goods handled, involved an average turnaround of 70-80 wagons a day, reaching a peak of 123 wagons on one occasion. May onwards brought the fruit traffic, of gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, and red and blackcurrants. Among the 30 or more staff were specifically-named potato porters to unload farm carts into wagons, and three coal handlers. Substantial four-wheeled fruit trolleys, pulled by hand, were used to carry up to 3½ cwt of goods to the loading stage in the yard. All fruit was 'passenger-rated', travelling as part of a carriage train, whereas vegetables carried during the same season, such as new potatoes, were 'goods rated', and made up a goods train also designated to carry lettuces, cabbages, broccoli and particularly green peas. Station equipment on hand included sack barrows with hoists, parcels hand carts and luggage barrows with two, three and four wheels to cope with all descriptions of period baggage from hatboxes to trunks. Horse-drawn vans delivered goods from the railway to the town and beyond, and it would be well into the 1930s before they were superseded by motor lorries.

The long decline

The railway's heyday was from the early 1890s to the 1920s, coinciding approximately with the ascendancy of bulb growing and the resulting flower traffic, and when the rise in annual tonnage handled at Holbeach rose from 40,000 to 110,000 tons. After that time, overall M & GN profits fell away appreciably. One factor was the growth of road transport, as lorries became larger and more reliable. It was a situation which made the M & GN easy prey for a takeover, and in September 1936 the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) took control and began a series of cutbacks, discontinuing excursion trains, scrapping locomotives and generally economising on track improvements. The war years saw a temporary revival, as the line served at least 10 airfields along its route between the Midlands and Gt Yarmouth. But afterwards the combination of local bus companies and growing car ownership hastened the beginning of the end. Some tried not to believe the inevitable, witness Ayscoughfee Owl writing in the local press in June 1958, when he said, 'For a few bob I can relax.I can glance up from my magazine to contemplate, across the fields, the pile-up of vehicles under a haze of petrol and oil fumes.My luggage is stowed neatly and orderly in the guard's van, not slung in the boot, and a chap shuts the door after me when I get out.'

But despite local protest, the passenger service through Holbeach ceased on 28th February 1959, with the track taken up beyond Sutton Bridge into Norfolk, and goods services were terminated on 2nd April 1965. After the railway's main elements were cleared away at Holbeach Station, Lefleys moved onto the site after selling their High street premises to HSBC Bank in 1969, and have occupied it ever since. The main station building was most recently the offices and works of Meridian Printers, but since that company's move to Long Sutton a few years ago, it has remained empty.

As we wait upon the old station's sentence, the railway's ghost may well be set to run through the middle of a few more houses in future. Time then, to prepare our imaginations, and think back to Ayscoughfee Owl's comfortable trips on musty moquette seating, gazing upon faded pictures of country mansions above the anti-macassars; recall, too, the memories of 1920s schoolgirls like my mother who, prior to Charlestoning their way down the street from Spalding station to the High School, survived journeys in the luggage racks, hoisted there by boisterous Grammar School boys forcing them out of their seats - if she arrived in Spalding at all, that is, encouraged as she was by my great aunt Kath Thompson to alight at Whaplode halt and play truant at Guy Wells.

Of such personal memories, the railway line through Holbeach was made. Perhaps on a quiet night then, among those newly-built houses that may take the station's place, we may hear the phantom arrival of a hissing, clanking black Class 4MT loco , followed by the slamming of carriage doors as a plaintive porter's voice from the past wails, 'Olbeach....'Olbeach....'Olbeach.'