GREAT COLES WOOD HALT

Railway World, April 1960 (Page 112)

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OUR footsteps echo in this cavernous place and the watchman's lamp serves only to half-reveal the queer-shaped objects that crouch on either side of us like huge bugs, each gaily coloured and chromium bright, their little wheels hugging the ground but scorning the double line of rails which runs beneath them through this great, high, vaulted shop, whose walls look down on a scene undreamed of in the days when they were raised to become the birthplace of the engines of an age that could not foresee the "bubble" car.

What irony of fate has brought this great works to the point of decay, where its only claim to continued existence is its partial adoption by the producers of a rival form of motive power!

Here, where Stroudley walked, where Robert Billinton watched his " Grasshoppers," take shape, stand the machines of a generation devoted only to the road.  The machine shop, where once the overhead shafting rattled and belts flapped and whirred is now a place of dim shadows.  The foundry, its hearths long dead and cold as the bearded, leather-aproned men who once tended them, stands chill and grey, with its flooring of dust
that muffles the tread.

Surely, ghosts walk here in the paint shop where, while Tommy Atkins footslogged across South Africa, stood Empress, Baden Powell, Kimberley and Pretoria, resplendent in their coats of L.B. & S.C. "improved engine green".

 

The night wind whistles mournfully through the dark and deserted erecting shop and, as the shadows fall behind us, we see, in imagination, graceful tank engines taking shape.  As we pass through the great doors into the night we take a last look back at a place steeped in the atmosphere of Brighton traditions, a place where the tyranny of John Chester Craven gave way to the fatherly benevolence of Stroudley, where Billinton the Elder brought a Midland look to the engines of the south coast and Marsh produced his magnificent Atlantics.

Through the doors by which we take our leave passed Colonel Lawson Billinton's Baltic tanks ready for the London road in the heyday of the L.B. & S.C.

Yet the spirits of these generations of Brighton men must surely exalt at the daily sight of the present-day rival products of their own great works being drawn out by rail, the only exit possible, on a rake of Conflat wagons in charge of the works shunter-a Stroudley "Terrier!"

[It is, perhaps, remarkable that Brighton Works lasted as long as it did.  Colonel Billinton, the last C.M.E. of the L.B. & S.C., thought at the time of the Grouping that it would probably soon close as a result of Southern Railway rationalisation.-ED., R.W.]