Building the M&GN

Railways predate the invention of photography, so the earliest images we have are mostly watercolours and ink sketches, or prints derived from them (most famously by JC Bourne):


While in the early days railway construction was fascinatingly new, by the time camera technology had developed to a point where it was easily portable the novelty had worn off.


There are therefore relatively few photographs of a Victorian railway under construction, which makes the discovery of a cache taken by a resident engineer on the M&GN all the more special:


Between 1890 and 1893, Charles Stansfield Wilson took around 70 photographs during the construction of the M&GN's 18 mile extension from the market town of Bourne to a connection with the Midland Railway at Saxby*.


Here Wilson recorded "during" and "after" shots of the construction of a rather grand overbridge near Saxby (note the delicate tapering of the piers).


In this delightful shot, the brick and stone arch of the underbridge (at Sewstern Road, Wymondham) has been completed, as has the embankment to carry the railway from one side. The tracks are now being used to bring spoil to deposit to the left of the arch, to continue the embankment:


This delightful shot is Grimsthorpe Park Bridge, and to the right it shows the contractor's temporary track (laid to help with construction), while the left shows the "permanent way" (so-called because it is, of course, the finished railway) -- here just in need of its final ballast:


This rather complex arrangement shows the M&GN passing underneath bridges at New Saxby Curve, near the junction with the Midland Railway:


Here's a view of another complex of bridges not far from those seen above, showing an underbridge crossing the River Eye:


Morkery Lane Bridge, at Castle Bytham, is a rather pleasing skew bridge, although the presence of the horse and cart is a reminder that there were no motorised road vehicles when this bridge was built, so the volumes of traffic on the lane would be very small:


A little further along the track, at Potter's Hill, Castle Bytham, the railway plunges into a cutting and this delightful overbridge elegantly spans the tracks:


The magnificent 5-arch viaduct at Lound is one of the most solid engineering features on the M&GN: over 1.5 million bricks were used in its construction. The central arch spans the relatively modest Lound Beck (now known as the East Glen River), and the arches on either side spring across the marshy flood plain. Unfortunately it suffered subsidence throughout its life:


Nonetheless, it was patched up and reinforced, and here it is today, still standing:


Whereas the M&GN had numerous bridges, it only had one tunnel -- at Toft, at the extreme western end of the system. Just 300 metres long it still required 2.5 million bricks to construct, but it avoided the need for sharp gradients:


Here the M&GN crosses the East Coast Mainline (the principal London-Scotland route of the Great Northern Railway, as it was at the time). While the GNR only has two tracks (plus a ropey-looking siding) the way has been built for four, and the M&GN's girder bridge has a sufficiently wide span that it would not need to be rebuilt if the GNR quadrupled its track (as it shortly after did):


And this is the last of Wilson's photographs in this post, a simple bridge over a narrow lane near Saxby:


I'll finish with a couple of shots to show what all that engineering was for -- here, goods traffic vies with passenger trains at Saxby station in the 1950s:


And here a modest-looking Ivatt 4MT hauls a heavy summer excursion train out of Sutton Bridge station:


It's sad to think that while some of these M&GN structures survive, they no longer serve any useful purpose.


* If you want to be pedantic, the M&GN wasn't legally formed until 1893 so this started out as the Midland & Eastern Railway's extension, etc.