Of Bo-Bos and fancy bridges

ONE hundred years ago this week, the Bo-Bos tried to haul the British railway system into the age of electricity.

The Bo-Bos were experimental electric engines, built at Darlington’s North Road works, which entered service on July 1, 1915, hauling coal from Shildon to Newport, on the banks of the Tees, near Stockton.

Other countries had had electric-powered trains for at least 20 years, and there were already several smaller lines in this country – the North Eastern Railway had itself electrified a section of track on Newcastle quayside in 1902.

SAD SIDINGS: In the distance is the Shildon footbridge. Echo photographer Bill Oliver took this picture on June 17, 1969, and wrote: "A year or two ago, these sidings were packed with traffic and shunting operations. Now, the odd diesel runs down the main line but the rest of the tracks are unused and rusting away. It illustrates the run-down of British Rail." The Locomotion museum now occupies this site

But the Shildon-Newport line was the first British attempt to use new-fangled electricity to power an industrial-sized railway. It was the brainchild of Vincent Raven, the NER’s chief mechanical engineer, who had been inspired by visits to America to dream of electrifying the East Coast Main Line. First, though, he needed a short line for an experiment, and the 18-mile line was chosen as his guinea pig because it was flat and mainly handled minerals – much of County Durham’s coal output was marshalled at the huge sidings at Shildon for onward distribution, with the blast furnaces and ironworks of Teesside being big consumers, and the docks at Newport exporting the rest. Minerals, of course, would not complain if the experimental technology delayed their trains – unlike passengers.

Substations were built at Preston-le-Skerne, near Aycliffe (this large brick building remained until the early 1960s when the A1 was driven through it), and at Erimus, near Newport, to provide the 1,500 volt DC power, and gantries were erected 300ft along the line to support the overhead power cables. However, the south Durham wind was regularly so strong that intermediate supports were soon added.

Ten electric engines were built at the North Road workshops in Darlington. They were numbered 3 to 12 (Nos 1 and 2 had been built in 1905 for use in Newcastle) and they were called “Bo-Bos” because of their wheel arrangement. Bo-Bo No 3 went into service on the first electrified stretch, between Middridge, near Shildon, to Bowesfield, near Newport, 100 years ago on Wednesday.

The £200,000 project was completed by January 10, 1916, and was deemed a success. The Bo-Bos could haul 1,400 tons at a minimum of 25mph. It took them 57 minutes to travel the line, and Raven worked out that five electric locos were doing the work of 13 steam ones. He was so impressed that he commissioned North Road to build Bo-Bo No 13 – an experimental electric passenger loco that he believed would soon run on the East Coast Main Line.

It never did. In fact, it never even had an engine fitted.

Instead, the exciting Shildon to Newport electrical experiment soon turned into a white elephant when the First World War ended. Traffic on the line declined, particularly following the 1921 coal strike, and the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s meant there was no money to invest in vast infrastructure projects like electrification of railway lines.

So the East Coast Main Line project was quietly shelved, and by 1935, when the Shildon to Newport technology needed renewing, that powers-that-be reverted to steampower.

The Bo-Bos went into storage and were slowly scraped – No 11 was the survivor, which shunted at the Ilford depot in London until 1964. The only relic from this first age of electricity is Bo-Bo No 1, the first of these curious push-me-pull-me creatures which operated on Tyneside from 1904 and it is now on display in Shildon’s Locomotion museum.

And so Raven’s experiment ended in failure, but only because it was at least 50 years ahead of its time. Today, of course, on the railways, we are travelling forever in his electric dreams.

JUST outside Shildon’s museum is an old railway footbridge, which featured in From the Saddle in Memories 232 and excited a lot of comment.

The footbridge stretches across the width of Shildon sidings, which were so large that some people claimed that they were the largest in the world while others call them “the most extensive in the kingdom”.

The footbridge grew as the sidings widened, and so it comprises at least three distinct sections. In the centre is a narrow stone arch; to the north is a long iron section with the maker’s name – Harris 1857 – on it; and to the south are a couple of slightly more recent segments.

The first question is what to call the footbridge.

“As kids, we called it ‘the fancy bridge’,” says George Allison in Spennymoor. “I have no idea why.”

Michael Warrior in Shildon says: “I can remember a few old timers telling me the bridge was called ‘the cattle bridge’ as it helped the farmer to get his cattle over the railway line.”

The steep field on the north, which is now being developed as a housing estate, used to belong to the Co-op and was known as “the store farm”.

“I can remember taking tractor loads of grain over that bridge in harvest time,” says Michael, “but due to a lack of maintenance, the sleepers on the bridge deck became unsafe. We still used to lead the cattle over to the fields after harvest and lead them back to the store farm for winter.”

Another name is the “accommodation bridge”. Accommodation bridges were built by early railways, and before them canals, to accommodate an already existing right of way.

However, most people locally seem to use a bovine-inspired name, either the cattle or the cow bridge.

Next question: how old is it?

“I have read that the small stone arch is the original route of the Stockton and Darlington Railway,” writes Mr AJ Bills from Harrogate.

Many correspondents and sources also date the footbridge back to 1825 although, like Mr Bills, there is enough room in their statements for a little doubt to creep in.

Mr Bills continues: “But, at present day heights and levels, Locomotion No 1’s chimney would be too tall to pass through the archway.”

In its early years, Locomotion exploded a couple of times and was rebuilt, so perhaps it grew. Or, perhaps the bridge does not date from 1825 – perhaps the S&DR, which was a notoriously penny-pinching enterprise, built it a few years later as the line became busier and cattle wandering across the tracks was becoming an issue.

However, if it does date from 1825, it must be one of George Stephenson’s earliest creations.

That does not mean, though, that it has been treated with reverence.

George Allison, who was born in nearby Soho Street in 1937, says in his day it had a different use. “I was a book-lad at the sidings in 1955, and there was a toilet in that archway,” he says. “It was embarrassing, really. There was room in there for three people to sit side by side – no cubicles – and use the toilet. You sat next to each other on top of a large pipe. There were no strings for you to pull as the water just went underneath you in the pipe, and whatever you dropped went away to the nearby sewage works.”

At this point, we’ll move on to the northern section of the bridge, which has the maker’s name on it. This is a listed building, protected because it is “a single casting of exceptional length”.

The listed building schedule suggests it was made by Mr Harris of Stockton, but Memories begs to differ. We think it was made by John Harris, a Lancastrian Quaker who arrived practically penniless in south-west Durham in 1835 but who soon became the S&DR’s resident engineer.

Despite a tendency to make enemies in business, Harris was a great success. He turned freelance in the 1840s, and set up a foundry at Albert Hill in Darlington. He built the Wakefield, Pontefract, and Goole railway, the Kendal and Windermere railway, and the Middlesbrough and Guisbrough railway.

He owned one of Darlington’s largest mansions – Woodside, between Blackwell Lane and Coniscliffe Road – and, partly due to ill health, he was able to retire soon after he built the Shildon bridge. He died in 1869, aged 58, leaving an estate worth £16,000 (about £1.6m in today’s values, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator).

It would appear that the cattle bridge needed expanding as the sidings grew and quarries nibbled into the side of the northern hill (one of our correspondents said that as a child she knew this hill as “the elephant hill”, which was good for sledging, although she couldn’t explain how it came by this name).

Wagons were brought to the Shildon sidings to be sorted into new trains and then sent off to their destination. “Three wagons would be going here and four would be going there,” says George. “An army scrap train would come in on a Saturday afternoon to be sorted, and I can remember that someone took a machine gun, with three legs, off the train and set it up in a quarry beside the sidings.

“I always wonder what happened to it.”