“SCATTERED over the country are hundreds of little places which retain the spirit of peace,” said a railway brochure in 1935 promoting the concept of “camping coaches”.
“There are wayside stations on branch lines which were busy in Victorian times, but are now quiet; perhaps only two or three trains pass a day. It is at these spots that camp-coaches are placed. The camp-coaches are on sidings out of the way of traffic, but not too far away from the station for comfort, and are in the care of the local station-master.”
READ MORE: IN OLD PICTURES: A TRIP ALONG THE COASTAL RAILWAY TO WHERE THE SANDS END
The London North Eastern Railway (LNER) introduced the concept of camping coaches in 1933, the year it also put the Northern Belle on the rails. The Northern Belle was a luxury touring service, marketed like an ocean-going cruise, only on a train.
Camping coaches were static and aimed at the other end of the market.
Old railway carriages were converted so that they had two bedrooms that slept a total of six people (one bedroom for two, the other for four), plus a dining room and a little kitchen.
These coaches were pushed into sidings beside picturesque stations and then let out to holidaymakers for 2s 10d a week – as long as they travelled to their holiday destination on a return rail ticket.
The holidaymakers nipped to the toilet or to collect drinking water in the station – would a 1930s station have a bath for them to use or did they wait to get home at the end of their week?
READ MORE: THE AMAZING VIADUCTS OF SANDSEND IN OLD PICTURES
From the start of the scheme, the spectacular east coast railway from Middlesbrough to Whitby, which we’ve been featuring in recent weeks, had a couple of camping coaches stationed at Staithes and Sandsend. As the idea took off, more coaches were placed at Kettleness, on the clifftop above Sandsend, and beside the East Row viaduct at Sandsend.
Tim Brown of Ferryhill has kindly sent in these small, Box Brownie photographs showing his grandparents enjoying their camping coach holiday somewhere on the line into Whitby in the 1930s. His step-grandfather, John Jameson, was a guard at Wolsingham and then Wear Valley Junction, and liked to gather his family once a year in a camping coach near Whitby.
By the end of the 1930s, there were many coast and country locations in the North East where you could camp in a railway coach: Askrigg, Aysgarth, Wensley, Barnard Castle, Romaldkirk, Frosterley, St John’s Chapel, Lealholm, Kirbymoorside and Ravenscar. Across the country, there were 200 old coaches stationed in pretty places for people to camp in.
READ MORE: THE RAILWAY LINE WITH A WAY WITH VIADUCTS
In 1935, the LNER took the idea one stage further and introduced the touring camping coach for £20-a-week. You started in your coach at York and at night it was moved on so that in the new day you awoke in a new station: Pateley Bridge, Aysgarth, Barney, Glaisdale and Coxwold with your week ending back at York.
Of course, the Second World War put an end to such frivolity, but in 1952, the newly nationalized British Railways reintroduced the scheme with the seaside lines near Whitby being popular camping destinations – indeed, the two coaches stationed at Robin Hood’s Bay and Scalby, near Scarborough, were the only ones in the region to have electricity.
The high point of the camping coaches was 1962 where there 223 vehicles dotted around more than 100 locations across Britain. However, this was the dawning of the jet set age and the start of the package holiday and tourists decided they preferred a week in a brand new hotel with all modcons in tropical Torremolinos than a few nights in an obsolete railway carriage in soggy Sandsend.
Camping coaches were withdrawn in 1971, but Tim’s pictures offer a rare insight into this fascinating phenomenon in the 1930s.
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The vagaries of the British summer weather are beautifully shown in these two pictures taken by a professional photographer of the coach-campers in Whitby. The photographer would have ambushed them on the street and then placed a print in his shop window alongside prints of all the other tourists he had captured that day - these were the days, of course, before everyone had a camera in their pocket...
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