Hopping along Abandond Tracks

T of TW Jan 2016

The Very Model of an Abandoned Railway

By Kent Barker

I was introduced, a while back, to a marvelous man who, for the sake of argument, we’ll call Simon.

He would, I guess, have been in his early-seventies. He lived in a tiny cottage down a track on the outskirts of Hawkhurst.  In its original incarnation his home would have been even smaller since it was built as two dwellings which were subsequently knocked together.  It meant there were two staircases, and the one leading to his office was extremely narrow, tortuously curvy, and with achingly low headroom.

This office was a sight to behold.  Simon is an architectural draftsman but the advent of CAD – computer aided design – had completely passed him by.  So what looked like a copy of every plan he’d ever drawn was rolled up and stored in the low-eved room.  Only a table in front of the dormer window was relatively free of old parchments – largely because it contained the plans he was currently working on, mounted on an old fashioned wooden drawing board with separate T-square. 

I’d asked Simon to draw me a couple of maps for the end papers of my book on 18^th century smuggling.  Since he refused to use either fax or scanner I had to visit him on a regular basis to monitor progress.  And a great treat it was to see an old-fashioned draftsman working just with pen and ink on tracing paper.  Though one did wonder at the efficiency of the process.  Architectural drawings on a computer would have taken a fraction of the time, and copies could be printed off or emailed, without having to drive into a nearby town to make a print from the original. But time, for Simon, seemed to be a relative concept, judging by the total lack of mod-cons in the house – including if I recall correctly an inside WC.

And so, I suppose, it should have been little surprise when, on one visit, he offered to show me the next room. If it was chilly in his office, next door was freezing.  And the sense of gloom was aided by a 40 watt overhead light bulb. But what filled the room was wondrous to behold.  It was an intricately detailed scale model of Hawkhurst railway station.  Now, before you say “I didn’t know Hawkhurst had a railway station”, well, it doesn’t. Anymore. Except in Simon’s top room.  The actual station closed in 1961 and the platform and track have been subsumed into an industrial park. Only the engine shed remains – now part of a commercial workshop.

I was reminded of Simon’s model when my son, back from uni for the seasonal break, came across a website detailing the remains of the ‘Hop Pickers line’ including Hawkhurst’s abandoned station and a completely preserved tunnel.  Alert readers may remember that Titus is an ardent explorer of disused buildings and derelict sites and a few months back I chronicled a trek he took me on to look at a former girls school, Lillesden Mansion.  So now of course we had to ‘find’ Hawkhurst station, Badger’s Oak tunnel and evidence of the abandoned line.

Oddly enough I’d already found part of it on one of the regular dog walks Myrtle and I do.  The footpath crosses a wide wooded strip between two fields which was the line of the disused railway. But I could never find traces of it where it should have bisected a road a little later.  Now the mystery was about to be resolved.

Armed with a torch, a map, and stout Wellies we abandoned the car at the side of the lane and set off through the woods.  Finally I could win the argument about maps and orienteering. Born in the digital age, Titus has never understood map-reading. What’s the point if you’ve got GPS on your phone, he demands.  Now I could show him the difference between a railway embankment and a cutting and explain why we couldn’t see the course of the line before it disappeared into the tunnel.  It’s just up ahead, slightly to the left I said.  And sure enough, as we crashed through the undergrowth there, down a steep slope, the entrance to the tunnel magically appeared exactly where I predicted. 

I have to admit it was pretty stunning.  Even after 122 years the arched brick-work is in excellent condition and still has those little passing places for maintenance crew to avoid passing trains.  It’s true the floor was extremely muddy, water dripped from the ceiling and it was desperately gloomy, but what a thing to come across in the middle of the countryside.  There are ongoing efforts to re-open parts of the Hop Pickers Line for leisure use, so the tunnel may be more widely visited in the future.

ends