Rowfant Station

This is nothing to do with the Hawkhurst Line. I started working in a new role on Monday for a construction company a few miles east of Crawley in West Sussex, their premises are on the site of an old railway station and goods yard which was on the Tunbridge Wells to Three Bridges Railway, so I feel compelled to add it to this site for general interest purposes.
This railway was built in 1855 and it lasted for 112 years before the Beeching axe fell on it in 1967.
I heard that a rich American owned some of the required land which he refused to sell it unless a  station was built for his use (the place is very rural even today). Not surprisingly the station was hardly ever used and it became a 'white elephant' although trains were obliged to stop there.

            The old railway station hidden among the trees. (Taken from Wallage Lane.)

                                                    

                                                    Was this once the main entrance?

More of the outside can be seen from 'Worth Way' a cycle path that runs most of the length of the line. This is looking towards East Grinstead. The track bed would have been the other side of the station.

On the business premises a lot of heavy lorries carrying aggregates pass over the old track bed, close to the station so I had to get permission to take pictures and wear a 'hi vis' jacket. The security guard (Andrew) was a very pleasant man from Hungary who chatted for about twenty minutes. He said that yesterday a coach load of train 'fanatics' has pulled up to look at the station. One of them was brandishing an original ticket. Andrew promised to email me the photo that he had taken, if he does I will add it to this posting.

The road is now some feet above the old track bed but the top part of much of the platform is still apparent.

There is a preservation order on the station site today but a closer inspection reveals that it could do with a coat of paint.

 All the widows are bricked or boarded up but it has not stopped a colony of bats settling there!

                This is looking towards Wallage Lane, Three Bridges and Crawley.

This seems to be the most imposing door, presumably this would be the way outside from the platform.

                                                            
                                                              Or maybe this one?

              A part of the platform (just beyond the kerb) the bricks look fairly recent.

The work site includes an area that was once a fairly large goods yard, the area is very flat and long so I will try to find out if there is anything else left to see.



Andrew told me that he was not able to find the ticket photo but he did send a photo of an old photo which is displayed in one of the offices.

Would the Hawkhurst line be profitable today and various plans to extend the railway

Hindsight is a wonderful thing if you have all the information to hand. I have no idea of what the running costs would be today of such an enterprise but can only look at the trends taking place up to closure in 1961. The railway had two income streams; passengers and goods.

Goods traffic was always the mainstay of this railway but today some commodities like coal are no longer used for heating purposes. The remaining railways have since been privatised and all the goods yards seem to have been sold off thus moving all the traffic onto the roads. It is nice to imagine that there would still be a fair amount of farm traffic if the line were still operating but I don't know whether it would still be feasible.

Passenger numbers were light for years, falling to just a couple of hundred a day by the end. I suspect that most of the passengers were travelling to and from work in London or perhaps Paddock Wood (I doubt whether many people were travelling from, for instance Goudhurst to Cranbrook (that is 1 mile from Goudhurst to 2 miles from Cranbrook). However, season ticket holder numbers seem to have been rising. In his book Brian Hart quotes the passenger and season ticket numbers for the years 1938 and 1949, these both showed an increase of 58%. Perhaps the economy was in a better shape after the devastation of the Second World War in that at least it was the start of thirty years growth without a recession. Although passenger numbers were to decline after this I do feel sure that season ticket numbers would have been gradually increasing as more people in these areas were prepared to make the sacrifice of a long commute for better paid jobs in London. My parents for example used all their savings to buy a house on the 'new estate' in Horsmonden because there was a railway station there and my father could get to work in Sevenoaks easily, but by the time the house was built in 1963 the railway had been closed! By the 1980's there must have been at least twenty people on that estate who worked in London (if our car was out of action we could always cadge a lift to Paddock Wood Station from our neighbour or the people over the road).. The 1960's 'baby boom saw two more estates go up in Horsmonden and I am sure similar changes happened in the other villages, so I really believe that if the railway existed today it would have four or five times the number of season ticket holders. 

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Brian Hart who wrote 'The Hawkhurst Branch' describes how as a young man and a volunteer on the fledgling  KESR heritage line he helped to remove some of the signalling from the Hawkhurst Line for use on the KESR and how he felt a sense of guilt doing it. During his time helping to reopen part of the KESR, British Railways wrote to them twice to ask why they did not concentrate on the Hawkhurst Line which was far more viable.

Possible Line Extensions

There were several ideas muted at the end of the Nineteenth Century some of which achieved parliamentary approval. Ambitious projects included terminating at Hastings, Rye, Windchelsea and even Dungeness! I wonder whether the future of the Hawkhurst Branch would have been a little rosier or not if any of the following extensions had taken place. Here are some of the more series proposals.

      Looking down the A299 in a southerly direction, a bridge was intended to be built to take
             the line across the road from Hawkhurst Station which once stood on our right.

1/ Hawkhurst to Appledore

This was be problematic to begin with as the ground appears to fall away to the east on the other side of where the bridge would be, so it would require extensive engineering in the initial stages. The Line was projected to run close to Benenden, Newenden, Sandhurst, Rolvenden, Tenterden (1.5 miles south of the town) and Appledore (this village already had a station connecting Rye and Lydd with Ashford). The full extension would have meant a further 14.5 miles of track. It must have been an exciting proposal, but looking at a map I do wonder how close to these communities the railway would have been, (perhaps they could have done Sandhurst, Newenden, Wittersham, Appledore but I do not know whether the topography would have allowed this.) Certainly Benenden and Tenterden would be too far north of the general direction of the railway.

Populations as at 2011 census

Benenden     2,374

Newenden       223

Sandhurst     1,478

Rolvenden    1,414

Tenterden      7,735
Appledore        800

2/ Hawkhurst to Etchingham

The village of Etchingham in Sussex already had a railway station on the Tunbrige Wells to Hastings line and was only six or seven miles from Hawkhurst station 'as the crow flies'. I think it would have been an engineer's headache to build the railway though as the track would have to turn south west which would have meant re-crossing the road further down. The engineers would be obliged to make quite a sharp turn so that the road is not crossed too far down the hill, otherwise enormous embankments would have had to be built to keep the line close to 'the level'.

Population as at 2011 census

Etchingham    1,187

3/ Hawkhurst to Hastings

This proposal was for a railway to Conghurst, Bodium Mill, Mill Corner, Brede Bridge, Doleham and Hastings (no I can't see these places on my road map even.) Again it would have meant crossing the road and somehow swinging south in the direction of Hawkhurst with the additional expense of building and manning stations in tiny hamlets.

Populations as at 2011 census

Conghurst          5? (has a farm!)
Bodium Mill      -
Mill Corner        -
Brede Bridge     -
Doleham            -
Hastings   88,000 (approx.)



4/ Cranbrook to Appledore

This would have meant that the line would branch just before Cranbook Station (leaving Cranbrook and Hawkhurst stations as a spur) before reaching Furnace Mill, Hendon Bridge (near Rolvenden), Redhill Bridge and Appledore. Once more the stations would have to be built and manned for tiny hamlets but hopefully this line would have required fewer earthworks in it's construction.

Populations as at 2011 census

Furnace Mill            -
Hendon Bridge        -
(Rolvenden)     1,414
Redhill Bridge         -
Appledore           800



5/ Cranbrook to Appledore (again)

This seems the to me to be the most commercially viable. (It would have run in an arc heading to the north east before veering to the south east after Sissinghurst.) The railway would part just before Cranbrook station and go directly into Cranbrook, near Sissinghurst, south of Biddenden, Tenterden, Reading Street and Appledore. (The original station site earmarked for Cranbrook had been close to the High Street and Stone Street to the south of the town, this would have been a perfect location for a station if they had been able to obtain the land to get there.) If they were able to build it the full length of this extension would be a further 16.5 miles leaving Appledore station at about 61 miles from Charing Cross Station.

Populations as at 2011 census

Cranbrook            6,717

Sissinghurst (a parish of Cranbrook)

Biddendon           2,574

Tenterden             7,735

Reading Street (a parish of Tenterden)

Appledore              800

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By 1900 the Kent and East Sussex Railway was opened from Headcorn via Tenterden to Rolvenden. This denied the Hawkhurst Line the prize of Tenterden and by then the appetite for building light railways was on the wane.

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Where would you have extended the railway to ?

For myself if I had been a director of the railway, I think that I would have swallowed my pride and tried again to extend the railway to Cranbrook and then I would wait to see how successful business was before inventing any more daring schemes.