Shippea Hill History - Bonus Video 

All The Stations brilliant! you can tell because she almost cracked up there 😋

if only it had an all the stations logo on the side, that would've been incredible!

I told you it was a nothing Geoff, on the D Stock remember? I was in a trio

All The Stations does anyone work in signal box there anymore

All The Stations Very quaint station

Likewise my family - my grandfather and my uncle, first on the Colne Valley and then the Stour Valley Railway. My uncle was signalman and gatekeeper at Cavendish until the line closed in 1967.

Wow that is pretty much where my family worked i wonder if they knew each other? my Grandpa was a signalman just outside Sudbury. And my Great uncles both drove trains on various lines including the stour valley and probably the colne valley. It is a shame they cut the line in 1967.

20 year vet on the railway: can confirm this is a true saying.

Glad to hear from a professional!

The old saying "The driver drives the guards train but under the signalman's signals"

Thanks for that; I remembered the gist of it, but not the exact wording.

It's the legacy of the Beeching axe. Back in the '60s a mass closure program was run to try and curb the railways' huge financial losses, About a third of the entire network was closed in the span of a few years, which was devastating for many small rural communities. There's now a ton of legal stuff you have to do to close a station to try and stop something like that ever happening again, which means stations hardly ever close anymore. Even stations that are in the middle of nowhere.

If only we'd had All The Stations, social media and flash-mobs in the Beeching era - things might have been so different!

And to save todays stations all over the world, there should be an "All the Stations" in every country, for that reason alone.

cowscrazy tit takes a lot of effort to close a station, so they leave them open with 1 train a day.

cowscrazy check out some of the stations on the WCML if you're interested in stations like this! :) Polesworth gets one train a day in one direction and both Barlaston and Wedgewood station get no service at all yet are still listed as 'open' by national rail lol

I say bring back the Norwich to Liverpool Street trains via Cambridge. We can have via Ipswich as well but a route via Cambridge would allow service to towns like Wymondham and Attleborough without a change of trains!

Ely was a raised island before Feb drainage. Hence isle of ely

A Geordie In Yorkshire// Craig Walker complete fluke !! sometimes things just work out that way ...

Was clearly meant to be :)

Btw loving all episodes guys!

Does his signal box still exist?

Sadly not, the box which is there now is a new build, based on the design of the box at Shippea Hill. The Station Master's house is still there, as is the farm where most of my family lived (about 30m from the station).

Ikr! What a coincidence!

I wonder if Shippea Hill always had low passenger numbers or whether this is something that has happened recently. I notice that the number or people who used it dropped from 378 in 2011 to around 20-50 every year since then. Maybe there are fewer trains that stop there than previously - and having only one train a day in one direction renders the station a bit pointless: who wants to be able to travel to Norwich but then not be able to come back (by train) until the weekend? I wonder what tales Vicki's great grandfather could have told of times gone by. My grandpa got his father (my great grandfather, whom I never knew) to write down his memories of early life. In an old school exercise book, in a very shaky hand, there are several pages of his memories as a boy in Dewsbury, including high-jinks when the MP came to canvas for an election (appropriate since it's the General Election tomorrow) and the lads all pushed the trailer that the MP was standing on to give his speech so it started rolling down the hill :-) Sadly it then ends with a short note by grandpa saying that his father had taken a turn for the worse and had died. Spurred on by this, my dad and I got my grandpa and my great grandma talking about their memories, including witnessing a tram that crashed into a building at the bottom of the hill where they were waiting for it, and my great grandpa's daring rescue of a man who "went mad" (probably carbon monoxide poisoning) 30 feet up the side of the iron foundry chimney and who was in danger of either falling off or being burned on the hot metal chimney. We recorded it and it's a treasured recording and transcript - two hours of reminiscences and a fine insight into life in the early 20th century. I love Vicki's pensive stare out across the fields followed by the tractor passing over the level crossing.

Yes, an excellent video - probably the best, along with the guided tour of the railway maintenance depot the other day.

Whilst Bell communication would have been used as part of the block working between the boxes, it is more than likely that the there was a Telegraph (Needle) system between the boxes for general communication in the era that is referred to.

If you look at the last paragraph in the section "Least used railway station" it talks about 19 people travelling from Shippea Hill as part of "All the Stations"

I'm from the area and it's nice to hear such a familiar accent on RU-vid for once

It's the spirit of her railway ancestors coming through via the DNA!

Obstacle detection equipment, checks for obstruction between the barriers before clearing the route

We have. It's Thurso. We've been to ALL the stations.

It's a request stop so the train only stops when someone wants to get off. They will make a note when that happens. Also simply count the tickets sold to and from shippea hill

Jimbo McHooch it's just done on ticket sales. No one counts who gets on or off.

Thanks

Well they should count who get's on or off, otherwise that will lead to massive abuse of this railway...

Got a taxi from Ely!

no no, we're calling it "Barney Arms" now. that is its new name. anyway, what about it?

There's one house right next to it (to the right if you're looking towards the road crossing), which is one house more than at Swale.

There used to be an Ostrich Farm just down the road!

trampoline

Thanks.

because she's superman in disguise

All The Stations best answer possible, gotta love you guys