hi i'm paul hello rebecca we explore old abandoned railways and stuff and other stuff bits and pieces
listen pieces today we're exploring the abandoned railway that is the weymouth to portland branch
and then on into portland because it has a lot of very old railways today's video
is also sponsored by the good people at pounce more on that later on indeed you can check out
all the links in the description below but for the meantime let's head to portland and tell you some
really quite quirky stories not this abandoned railway though is it it is abandoned but not
the one we're doing no this is the one that went down from weymouth to weymouth harbour we're gonna
do one that was almost parallel in fact our first abandoned station is just behind us in mcdonald's
so we've just left weymouth as we said now weymouth the railways reached there in 1857
and the original plan was to link up with portland the isle of portland because there was a lot of
old quarries on there and it was deemed it would be perfect for the freight side of the railways
but it didn't happen it took another seven or eight years for them to link up with weymouth
and portland railway but they did in 1865 as some of the signs depict their 100 years of the
railway along here so this is the first part of today's journey the weymouth and portland railway
rodwell mark's 1 000 meters since the start of the journey up at uh west ham and again not
much of a halt more like a main line station you've got two platforms one on each side
hold on this one's brick that one's stone yeah maybe a later edition perhaps
sandsfoot castle hulk we're heading downhill significant we couldn't find sanders for
castle holt and then all of a sudden we saw this
open 1932 which explains why it's not like the others which opened 20 years previously yeah
so this is now wykeregis holt what we're looking for and we're pretty sure it's
another uh wooden one because we've seen the old picture online from like 20 years ago
and we're almost sure it's somewhere in that hedge because there was a lovely sign and the
old platform was there and you could see it all but now it's just covered in gorse and bramble
um so we're gonna head towards a chisel beach portland now portland is an island apart from the
fact that chisel beach connects it chisel beach is fascinating natural phenomena of uh shingles
stones all sorts 18 miles long and it goes all the way up the the dorset jurassic coast but that
is what makes portland an island or doesn't make portland island the fact that chisel beach exists
so ahead of us now is the beautiful chisel beach i remember coming here as a kid 18 miles of stone
separating itself from the inland now behind us just there would have been the very famous
weymouth and pouch railway pouch did you just say pouch yeah let me just let me just check my notes
yeah weymouth and pouch railway built 1865 mixed gauge so it could take standard gauge
and broad gauge railway trains to portland as in pouches in the free desktop browser extension that
automatically pops up when you're shopping and gives you the best discount codes yeah it does
seem a little bit odd doesn't it that a desktop browser extension would uh build such an important
link to the island but nevertheless it did okay well what else did pouch build apart from railways
well funny you should say that because the other day i was looking at mountain warehouse website
and i found myself an amazing deal of three in one waterproof coat and when i got to the the checkout
area you get to pouch automatically popped up now it found me a discount code and it applied it and
even though it was in the sale it still saved me a further 13 pound 50. which is about 15 off
it's amazing and i also heard that they actually work on over 3 000 uk websites such as game ebay
tesco's argos and so many more and here is another new thing that pout to do guess what it is
i'm not even going to let you guess they build tunnels as well as railways and viaducts
you what combine that with the fact that they have now launched pouch points so if there are no live
codes available at the time when you're shopping you can still earn points from participating
retailers which can be redeemed for gift cards and such oh cool well patch only takes a couple
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right that's most of the weymouth and pouch right way from portland williamson portland
railway's done and now we're going to come to more of the that's kind of
exciting railways because it's all the old railways what came before the 1865 railway
and that's what i really got quite passionate about in terms of the old tramways and there's
so many up on the top of portland including an extension to the williamson portland railway
okay so we're walking up one of the inclines one of the very early railways before locomotives and
steam engines that were moving and we're looking for a specific pathway we're going to um talk
about this a little bit later but first of all we're looking for the uh extension to the weymouth
and portland branch we're looking for the eastern and church hope railway so in 1866 there were more
proposals to take this line from portland uh its current terminus a bit further and they were kind
of like the east side of the island which is quite picturesque but that wouldn't happen for another
34 years that line wasn't built around that side of the island until 1900 so what happened there
what happened there rebecca i don't know what did happen there well let's talk about that now okay
so when we eventually get to easton we'll note that it's the terminus of that line
and it kind of sets itself right in the middle of the isle of portland
but if you look at an os map you'll note that it's 100 meters or 110 meters above sea level
but it's only two kilometers or so from portland station which is down at pretty much sea level
give or take so how do they traverse 100 meters in just two kilometers well we instead need to head
south from eastern to start losing some of that uh that altitude height yes the height yes okay
so 1872 the line started to be constructed at last we're going to have a railway now
to reach the middle of portland and maybe so exploit some of these
wonderful quarries that have been here for years sorry they're going to hit your head
but it stopped straight away we don't know why and instead of that an admiralty railway
was built along the north coast rather effectively and fairly quickly however 1888
we're still 12 years for construction of this lined over the old completion of this line
but all of a sudden the eastern and church hope railway think they could utilize the
admiralty railway and they do just that so they then begin building their line once again
1888 now don't forget we're still 12 years away from it being open so what went wrong there again
so it's fair to say the landscape has changed quite a bit in recent years or certainly since
the closure of the line in 1952. interesting that sign said the line closed in 1965 but i'm guessing
that's freight because many of the halts along the original line and easton i think closed in 1952
but nevertheless we can't find the railway we've just seen a bit come out of easton where
the station was around the curve and it should be down here somewhere but i feel like we're too high
there is a path down here but i still feel like we're way too high for the railway
but ahead of us is a beautiful expanse of sea
this meat that's lovely that is just you never sort of um bored by the sight of the sea
maybe you do if you live by it yeah that's a very good point but we don't so here we are
but we found we found the trap bed so we're heading as if we're going out of portland
choo choo along the uh eastern coast and it's beautiful what you imagine this is a little train
ride rebecca looking out towards the sea there that would have been amazing it would have been
wouldn't it and there's all sorts of weird and wonderful activities going along this coastline
people climbing up the edge which to our minds is mad 1888 and we're still 12 years away from the
line being opened so what you've got to remember i think portland and the quarries and the stone here
was extremely hard so it basically took them 12 years to build this five kilometer railway
12 years no tunnels yeah the small viaducts no tunnels and they literally spent 12 years
blasting at the rock face to create what we're on now the railway into eastern so it turns out
that if you want to get down from two kilometers you actually need to extend your line to five
kilometers and go all the way around the outside of the pile of portland right so that's the branch
railway done the extension of the branch railway as well what we want to have a quick look at now
is something a lot older than that railway itself let's go back to the year
18 25 18 26 and have a look at the early quarian and the early railways because it's
such a fascinating story we need to head back along the branch up onto the top of verne
so at the top of the verne now and here's where the story of the old
railways begins and when i say old i mean pre uh locomotion pre um a locomotive that moves
so it's 1820 and the iron island of portland is exporting 27 000 tons
per year of stone and they want to remove the bottle they want to increase that production
now the bottleneck is getting the stone from up here 100 meters down to see where the port is
so when we talk about tramways what exactly do we mean tramways could have been anything from
bits of wood planks stone guided rails or l-shaped plate ways you name any kind of primitive railway
that didn't have an exact specification now 1820s as i say they wanted to remove the bottleneck here
so they decided that actually instead of using horses everywhere because it was
deemed a little bit cruel on the horses of lugging as breaks down some of the old trackways here
they deemed that actually they wanted one of these newfangled tramways and it was 18 uh 2026.
i wonder where they got that notion from i wonder if it was from sort of people like the the hate
or tramway over in dartmoor who built his own granite railway or perhaps because for the last
30 40 years they've become very very commonplace in industry but anyway for the time being
a group of merchants uh quarrymen from here on the island portland decided that they wanted to spend
about five or six thousand pounds on one of these newfangled railways
now we showed you a couple of the or at least one of the inclines earlier that were built
for this early merchants railway and there's a couple of really cool viewpoints i want to
show you this and old stonework there i wonder if that's part of it um just down there on the floor
look that's part of the old railway system they had here the tramway system they had
but just across to my left across the the valley here um you can see the lines in the landscape
and you can see where they built them there's lots of old stone work along here i'm seeing now which
for sure would have been part of a tramway system here because you can even see the holes in them
so there's quite a few different lines built around here at different times and the success of
that early tramway around here really meant that a lot of other tramways within quarries would then
all link up so you can imagine the prosperity of that business here after 1826 and the success of
this tramway well it's really proved by the fact that it didn't close to 1854. now they still used
horses i don't really think that they didn't use horses thereafter they still use them but
what they did do on the inclines is used barrel drums to to load up and down the hill i think on
a balance system at least on on the most of them now i'm not going to bore you with the evolution
of the tramways here because it tells a very long arduous story what i do want to show you
is one of the most iconic shots in early tramway railway history which i think is just ahead of me
a bit worn out but that's a trip i've been wanting to make for a very very long time rebecca will be
grateful for staying at the top of this incline on this occasion it's been a long day so we'll
forgive her um all grade either tour grade one listed building so they're not going anywhere
half joked earlier when i was talking about the hate or granite tramway tramway railway made out
of a stone and i was trying to find out what they would have used here just by looking at some of
the stones so did they um hold the rails in place using uh pins into granite and was it like an iron
plate way but i don't think it was certainly on the inclines because it looks like the
the bits that have carved out of of the stone i just rounded so i wonder if they just guided
the rails down but it has left us with such a legacy but uh yeah 130 years this tramway
lasted and it outlasted outlived some railways that had closed themselves around the country
1854 so it does show you the success of this railway was perhaps what it was carrying
there was no other means really to get this down there of course passengers went to use the bus
but really could they do anything for stones because they couldn't so this railway remained
1954 that's quite staggering in terms of a uh a closure of a tramway let's go find rebecca
hello i'm rebecca everybody hi it's all good i wasn't lost you didn't throw off cliff honest
she's still here it's all good um that's it for today's video what a wonderful little explore
today it has been gorgeous bit nippy but gorgeous people good late february bit nippy but utterly
utterly wonderful a little expiration day we've learned a lot about the old railways around here
and how a tr quarry crawl corey tramway outlasted the actual railway itself which is a bit mad
big thanks to our sponsor pouch uh don't forget to check out the current deals in the description
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we will uh bid you for well see you next week