The Swanage Railway Trust

Evening Trains

Our evening diesel services between Swanage and Corfe Castle, currently running on Fridays and Saturdays, will run daily from Friday 14 July to Saturday 9 September. Trains depart Swanage at 6.10, 7.10, 8.10, 10.00 and 11.00 pm and Corfe Castle at 6.37, 7.52, 8.50, 10.35 and 11.25. Travel on any train after 5.00 pm and enjoy unlimited travel for the evening for £4.

Swanage Carnival Fireworks

We shall be running an intensive evening train service from Norden to Swanage and back in connection with the Fireworks on Saturdays 29 July and 5 August.

For train times call at the Station, phone 01929 425800 or visit our website at www.swanagerailway.co.uk.

Catering at Swanage and Norden

The Bird’s Nest Buffet coach at Swanage, open daily in the summer from 9.00 am to 5.30 pm, will also be opening on Saturday and Wednesday evenings from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm from Saturday 8th July until Saturday 9th September. The Norden Nest Buffet coach, at guess where – Norden – is also open daily from 10.30 am to 3.45 pm serving light refreshments, especially for passengers waiting for their train to Swanage. Dorset Cream Teas are now being served…!

Save £££s!

Holiday Season Tickets are now on sale for 2, 3 or 5 days’ unlimited travel on our day and evening train services. Tickets are available from our booking offices or try your local camp site or Tourist Information Centre.

Purbeck Railway Circle

As you will see from the following article, we are celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the Opening of Dorset’s first ‘railway’ this year – the Middlebere Plateway. It ran from Norden to a quay on the edge of Poole Harbour at Middlebere. At our next meeting on Friday 21 July, Peter Sills, Chairman of the Purbeck Mineral & Mining Museum Group, will give us a PowerPoint presentation on this historic railway. We meet this time in Harmans Cross Village Hall at 7.00 for a prompt start at 7.30 p.m. Non-members welcome. Contact Mike Stollery on 01929 421492.

The Middlebere Plateway – Dorset’s First Railway, 1806.

The industrial revolution came early to Purbeck, in the form of Dorset’s first railway. In 1806 Benjamin Fayle, a London Merchant, built a horse drawn wagon-way to transport ‘ball clay’ from his pits at Norden, near Corfe Castle, to a wharf at Middlebere on the south west shore of Poole Harbour. This engineering feat was some 3½ miles long, with a gentle downward gradient towards the harbour of 1 in 180; it was more than likely engineered by Benjamin Outram, the famous canal and plateway engineer from Derbyshire. The plateway cost in the region of £7,000 to construct, a considerable sum of money in 1806.

This new method of transport replaced the rather inefficient method of pack-horses moving very small quantities of clay across the heath. The new plateway enabled 10 tons of ball clay, pulled by 2 horses in 5 wagons, to be transported at a cost of 6d per ton; the cost of the ball clay including transport to Middlebere Quay was in the region of 18 shillings (90p in today’s currency) per ton. The clay was sold in oblong chunks called ‘balls’; some say the name was derived from the ‘turbal spade’ that was used for digging it, others say that when the oblong chunks of clay were ‘weathered’ they eroded into spheres or ‘balls’, hence the name.

During the 101 years that the Middlebere Plateway operated, it transported many hundreds of thousands of tons of clay. The line finally closed in 1907 when a new railway was built to a deep-water quay at Goathorn and this new shipment point allowed the direct transport of clay from Dorset to the Staffordshire Potteries without the need to transfer from a small barge to a larger coastal vessel for the onward journey. The accompanying photo shows the Plateway in the early 1900's at New Line Farm, with a rake of loaded wagons waiting to depart for Middlebere Quay. (Photo courtesy of the Ben Buxton collection).

Today you can walk along the old formation of the plateway from Slepe Heath to the disused quay at Middlebere. The cuttings and embankments are still clearly visible, as are one or two of the old stone sleepers to which the cast iron tram plates were fixed. The Purbeck Mineral & Mining Museum at Norden has a small Ball Clay Exhibition and some artefacts from the long closed Middlebere Plateway. Currently an underground mine, narrow-gauge railway and a mining stage are being rebuilt to form a working clay museum at Norden. The museum is adjacent to the Park & Ride station at Norden and is run by the Swanage Railway Trust. The Museum is open during the summer months on most Sundays from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm.

As mentioned above, I am giving an illustrated talk to the Purbeck Railway Circle entitled The Middlebere Plateway – Dorset’s First Railway at Harmans Cross Village Hall at 7.00 for 7.30 pm on Friday 21 July. All welcome.

Peter Sills,
Chairman of The Purbeck Mineral & Mining Museum.

If you are interested in joining the Railway to help in any way, such as with the Mining Museum, contact Volunteer Liaison Officer Mike Whitwam on 01202 430894, leave a note for him at Swanage Station Booking Office email him or write to him at SRT, Station House, Swanage, BH19 1HB.

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Photographs

All photographs on this page by and copyright Andrew P.M. Wright,
Swanage Railway official photographer