The floods around Christmas damaged a number of railway lines, among them the South Eastern Railway’s main line at Shakespeare Beach, between Folkestone and Dover. The March issue of the Railway Magazine reports that Network Rail has carefully investigated the construction of the sea wall in planning the repairs to the line. The report, judging by its style, was compiled from a Network Rail press release: “Network Rail has had to turn archaeologist… Steve Kilby, senior programme manager for Network Rail, said…”. “The company”, reports the RM, “is having to take this approach because of an absence of any significant maintenance records from the Southern Railway era (1923-1947).” They have carried out a laser survey, and dug trenches and bore holes. “Not only that,” the report continues,
but they have also been spending time in local newspaper archives to try and find any useful information.
They have discovered that the railway here was originally carried on wooden trestles above the beach, but in 1927 the Southern Railway built the current sea wall alongside it. Thousands of tonnes of chalk were then deposited around the viaduct to encase it; the railway being relaid across the top.
Now Edwin Course, in The Railways of Southern England: The Main Lines (1973) writes: “the east end of Shakespeare Cliff Tunnel led out on to the top of the beach, which the railway followed on a wooden trestle viaduct. In 1927, as part of the Southern Railway’s improvements for continental traffic, this was replaced by an embankment supported on the seaward side by a concrete retaining wall.” And C. F. Dendy Marshall’s 1937 History of the Southern Railway (in Roger Kidner’s revised edition of 1963) quotes the Board of Trade’s inspecting officer in 1844, “the two short portions of the railway formed along the beach… have been protected… [at Shakespeare Beach] by a strong timber viaduct”, and adds, “The timber bridge survived until 1927… The line is now carried on an embankment behind a concrete wall.”
I am very glad that Network Rail’s staff used archives in their work. It is likely that in consulting old newspapers they went beyond the bare facts and learned something of the context and historical detail of the times of the railway’s construction and of its reconstruction, which is illuminating in itself. But the essence of the story – the line‘s structure where it runs along the beach – was not their discovery. (Edwin Course, who in his preliminaries mentions having used Dover public library, surely consulted some of the same papers.)
I hope Network Rail’s staff have acquired a taste for archives and their possibilities. But it is a pity they presented as an original discovery something they could have got from a secondary source – and that the Railway Magazine swallowed their press release whole. The Railway Magazine, the oldest publication of its kind, has long been a journal of record, but in this case PR sadly seems to have smothered scholarship.
My Archives 