Standing a few hundred meters south of the tunnel this little bridge connected a very quiet lane with a few houses and orchards to the rest of the village. It looked very innocuous until you looked down into the cutting about 45 feet below, there are no photographs. But looking up from the track bed (until the early 1960's) you would have seen a very high red brick bridge with three graceful spans supported on very tall piers. There is only one photograph known in existence (again in Brian Hart's book) which was taken from the track bed and looked like the bridge was 100 feet high although only train drivers would ever get to see it.
--------------------
Update of January 2017
I have since discovered a 1958 drivers cab cine film of the bridge on YouTube and below are two screen shots as the train approached the bridge heading down towards Horsmonden Station shortly after leaving the tunnel.
The train's funnel and dense vegetation obscure our view of the outer arches but it would have looked spectacular from the track bed.
Even these pictures fail to give the full height of the structure as you cannot see the track bed because the camera was placed high up on the train.
The full YouTube video can been seen using the following link but it only shows a couple of seconds of this rarely recorded bridge.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO69U5Blvxo
'Oh my God that's huge!'
Since I became aware of this footage I have contacted David Scully at Tunbridge Wells Borough Council archeology department who was amazed at the height of the bridge and will include this bridge on their database. He said that the council are taking the hop pickers project seriously and that way markers are starting to be erected in the Paddock Wood area allowing walkers to begin to walk the length of the line. He said that even Horsmonden parish council have been forced to take this seriously and that he recently walked the infilled cutting from the station site to the bridge.
Above a photo of Back Lane today, the cutting continued under about where the wooden fence was. Walking there now you may never imagine that there was a bridge here.
When complete there was a parapet a few bricks deep and about 4 feet six inches high on both sides of the bridge so that most adults could rest their elbows on the bridge when looking down. The sides of the cutting though were merely grassy banks with a sheer drop and I don't remember there ever being a fence up to protect people. In no time it seemed people were pushing old cars down there so that by the late 1960's there may have been thirty cars on top of each other at the bottom of the cutting. As boys we were told not to go down the cutting as it was dangerous, but it was also interesting and you may as well ask the world to stop spinning as ask boys to stay away from such a place. As young children we often went down there and it was dangerous but we found a way down anyway. Meanwhile for years the local village idiots (of which Horsmonden had more than its fair share) continued to push old cars and other rubbish onto the track bed and it quickly began to consume the bridge. (No body lifted a finger to stop this happening, no signs went up warning people off, no fences, not even a cordon of string, the council and locals did nothing. This may have partly a sympton of 1960's / 1970's attitudes, but still). From this point onwards the collective memory of the railway receded and it was just known as 'the dump'. Strangly, now fences have appeared 40 years too late.
It was quite common every summer for fires to start, there would be black smoke billowing up into the sky and then the fire brigade would have to come out and the police. In the 1960's and 1970's it was fair game for adults to dismiss these events as the work of 'stupid kids,' but looking at it logically now it was probably usually caused by the sun shining on broken glass in the cutting and igniting combustible materials (left there mostly by mindless adults). All the track bed south of the bridge to the station site which was owned by Mr W Barge was being filled in with tipper trucks full of rubble from the early 1970's.onwards.
One good thing did happen though, the local plastics factory made subuteo figures, these were also painted on site. Some of the figurines failed the quality control and someone had dumped the sub standard ones from the bridge. It was not long before word got around that there were free subbuteo figures and it was a boy magnet all around the village. I myself remember scrabbling through the dust and mud (the smell of verdancy had long gone and it smelled like a dump then) looking for Coventry City, Derby County and Wolves players, unfancied teams today perhaps but all Division One teams from about 1974. I remember looking up at the arches of the bridge which began to curve only about eight to ten feet above our heads at this time.
This is all that is left of the parapet at the top of the bridge which curved outwards slightly so that the road was fractionally wider at each end. Someone has been employed to destroy the parapet of this wonderful bridge with a sledge hammer, why on earth, it doesn't make the road any wider.
Not much changed after that except there was a rat infestation because local villagers kept throwing their food waste off the bridge (as well as other rubbish) which attracted hordes of rats. Today there is no visible sign of the bridge, the cutting is full all the way from the near the tunnel's southern portal to Horsmonden Station site and as a result all the commuters will have to carry on driving to Paddock Wood as they may never get their station back. A big house has now appeared within a stone's throw of the tunnel and the whole track bed is somebody's garden. Personally I really hope the cutting is re-excavated and the garden disappears again forever. This beautiful bridge deserves so much more respect than the wreckers at Horsmonden parish council and non thinking locals have given it.
Above a view from Back Lane looking across the school playing field towards the trees that lined the cutting south of the bridge. One summers day I remember eating my school dinner watching one of the fires and flames were leaping up the trees perhaps 20 feet in the air.
North of the bridge, this was once a deep cutting (wide enough for two trains) but now covers part of someone's extensive garden, the trees in the foreground were part of the bank and underneath the fence the bridge still exists together with perhaps fifty old cars.
A few months later in early August I popped over to take a look at what had been the cutting south of Back Lane Bridge before it was filled in during the 1970's. This patch of track was quite remarkable due to it's depth (up to 55 feet) and it extended for about 500 metres to the station site. It is now colonised by blackberry briars and stinging nettles, a haven for moths and butterflies no doubt.
Above, looking north towards the site of Back Lane Bridge, it is hard to tell due to the plant life but the whole lot has sunk a few feet down into what was the cutting over the last thirty years so it is still possible to discern the sides of the cutting. Here the line had been built wide enough for two tracks so Wally Barge must have made a fortune from all the tipper trucks that came to dump their rubbish. I had hoped that the ground would have settled exposing a little of the south side of the bridge but I underestimated how overgrown it had all become making it difficult to get to.
This would have been the eastern bank of the cutting, beyond the trees would have stood apple orchards.
Looking south into the jungle towards Horsmonden Station site. Remember, this was a deep cutting. In 1961, beyond a belt of trees there were apple orchards all along on the east side and cherry orchards to the west. I believe that filling in this cutting has been the single biggest act of destruction to the line, ensuring that probably no trains will ever run here again. As Network Rail pointed out the costs of re excavation would be huge.
----------------
By the early 1980's the cutting was virtually filled in, and local residents received notice of a request for planning permission to build a street of houses on top of the track bed! everyone was angry and my father went around all the houses seeking support for all his objections. (I don't think that it was ever going to go through because the soil was still unsettled and the builders would have to underpin the houses which would have cost a fortune). I remember going to a council meeting in Paddock Wood with my father and half the anxious residents of the estate, where the application was rejected.
Some weeks later Wally Barge did come to our house and dissapeared ino the lounge with my father to 'make peace' as that he wanted to be on good terms with the community if possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment