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Years ago, I was on a rare passenger working through Toton. The ranks of stored wagons and locomotives made it feel like an elephants' graveyard,
As Our History Underfoot – the new name for the old Trekking Exploration account – discovers here, the vast yards and loco depot Toton are largely derelict today. This was to have been the site of the East Midlands Hub for HS2, but that won't happen now.
Besides Toton, we see the River Erewash and some of the tangle of lines that makes Long Eaton a railway labyrinth.
Here's another great video from Trekking Exploration – like and subscribe everybody. I've visited the sites four of the five Long Eaton stations he identifies myself.
The first would be really useful to the town now, as it;s on the line from Nottingham to St Pancras.
The second is the one I haven't visited.
The third was in the centre of town - the line is still in use, but only by goods trains.
The fourth is Trent Station, one of those large interchange stations in the middle of nowhere that the Midland Railway went in for. Here I have the advantage over the video as I have photographed the very overgrown bridge it mentions. You can see it below. On my first hunt for it I got as far as Trent Cottages.
The fifth is the Long Eaton station that is open today, though its further from the town than any of the other four.
Is the shortage of funds for canal maintenance starting to show? As the commentary on this video says, there have already been a number of serious breaches or failures of equipment reported this year.
Trekking Exploration - why not subscribe to this YouTube channel? - follows up reports of a stretch of the Erewash Canal without water, and finds they are right. Both the upper and lower gates at one lock are letting water through, so the pound above has run dry.
The Erewash stretches from Great Northern Basin at Langley Mill to the Trent at Long Eaton. It was built to connect local coal mines with the inland waterways system.
One of my favourite stretches of canal is the five miles from Cromford to Ambergate in Derbyshire's Derwent Valley. I first came across it in 1977, which was when our English teacher had wangled the funds to take his A level set on a field trip to D.H. Lawrence country and we camped beside the river at Whatstandwell.
At that time those five miles of canal were in navigable condition and the Cromford Canal Society ran popular horse-drawn trips along them. But round about 1990 the society broke up in the midst of a scandal whose details I cannot remember and the canal returned to desuetude.*
It has since been taken over by the trust that looks after Arkwright's Mill at Cromford,** and improvements are being made.
But when those five miles are fully restored, the Cromford Canal will still be cut off from the main inland waterways system. Because Ambergate is nearly 10 miles from Great Northern Basin, which marks the other end of the Cromford Canal.
Great Northern Basin is at Langley Mill in Derbyshire and is the start of the Erewash Canal, which is navigable all the way to the Trent at Long Eaton - I have visited the other end of it at Trent Lock there.*** A disused portion of the Nottingham Canal that joined the surviving stretch at Lenton in the city began there too - there were so many canals there because of the lucrative coal traffic.
A start at restoring the first mile or so of the Cromford Canal out of Great Northern Basin is being made. As this video explains, there are considerable challenges in this: part of the route has been lost to a road scheme and opencast mining.
The solution is to dig a new route for the canal, making use of an old railway track. Importantly, the track has a bridge under the new road because trains were still running along it when the road opened.
This is great news, but there are still formidable obstacles to be overcome if the whole of the Cromford Canal is to be restored. Chief among them is the partially collapsed Butterley Tunnel.
If you are interested in this canal and the prospects for its restoration, there are a couple of posts on this blog with videos that may interest you:
Work on the eastern leg of the High Speed Two rail line has stopped, the project's chief executive has admitted. Officials are busy preparing plans to extend the HS2 line north west to Manchester, but they have been told by the Department for Transport to halt work on the planned section between Birmingham and the East Midlands, and onwards to Leeds.
HS2 Chief Executive Mark Thurston said: "We wait to be guided by the Department on what we do with the eastern link."
It has been rumoured for some time that the East Midlands leg of HS2 is under review. And, as someone who has always found this project hard to love, I am not heartbroken at this news.
I know the arguments about HS2 increasing the capacity for regional services, it's just that they appear not to hold true here in the East Midlands.
The HS2 business case claims that 80% of passengers from Nottingham will transfer from MML to HS2, and to help this heroic punt come true, hidden in with the small print, you find the assumption that direct trains from the new Nottingham Hub to St Pancras will be cut by half. Well, that will do a lot for city centre competitiveness, I don’t think.
So actually Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield get a worse train service to their city centres, where most people want to be, than they do now - but great if you want to drive to a Parkway station. Leicester, a city of some half a million people will no longer have a mainline service as such.
It is bizarre if not surprising that a project which started with the aim of boosting provincial cities should end up promoting plans which will hugely undermine city centres and urban economies and positively promote exurban motorway sprawl.
Harborough FM, which these days provides the best local news service, reports that the government is again looking at the idea of electrifying the railway from Market Harborough to Sheffield.
A Department for Transport spokesperson has told the radio station:
"Enabling and design work is currently taking place to progress electrification of the Midland Mainline beyond Kettering to Market Harborough, as well as to enable the introduction of the new bi-mode trains to be introduced on the route in 2023.
"Further electrification of the MML to Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield is currently being examined by the Department and Network Rail, and is at an early stage of development.
"This work will be subject to the development of a satisfactory business case."
And earlier this week Construction Enquirer had news of a "market engagement day" for potential contractors for this work.
The Conservatives said during the 2017 general election campaign that the wires would reach Sheffield, even though Chris Grayling had also taken the decision to scrap the project.
Visiting Derbyshire during the 2019 campaign, Boris Johnson suggested that it might go ahead after all.
Our prime minister has a well-established habit of saying whatever will get him through the next 10 seconds regardless of its truth, but maybe he was not lying here.
With every spare inch of his travelling hardware van packed with useful items Ken Hollingsworth takes to the road from the Long Eaton Co-operative store following a circular route through South Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Film maker J.H. Poyser takes the journey in the passenger seat capturing rural lanes teaming with more cows than traffic and an eager public ready to buy everything from chimney brushes to clothes airers.
J.H. Poyser filmed a series of promotionial and educational films for the Long Eaton Co-operative Society. A helpful map traces the route taken by the hardware van from Long Eaton via Castle Donington, Diseworth, Long Whatton, Sutton Bonington, West Leake, Kingston on Soar, East Leake, Gotham, Barton in Fabis, Thrumpton, Ratcliffe on Soar, Kegworth, Lockington, Hemington and back over the River Trent to Long Eaton. This is an area that has drastically altered over the years as a result of new road building, including the A453 Nottingham to Kegworth road and the route of the M1 motorway.
Montague Maurice Burton (1885-1952) opened his first store in Chesterfield in 1904, and entered the bespoke tailoring business in 1912. By 1914, there were 12 shops, mainly in the north of England; by 1939 there were 595.
At first the stores occupied existing buildings, but from 1923, new stores were built on freehold sites, and prominent town-centre corner sites (such as this one) were favoured. In about 1932, the company established its own architectural department, which maintained the house style established by the architect Henry Wilson, who had been working for the company since 1923.
In about 1937, Nathaniel Martin became chief architect, so this store is probably his work. Burton's stores are important as pioneering exponents of corporate architectural style, and as sponsoring Art Deco design.
This piece of architectural history comes from the Listing for a Burton's store in Aberystwyth and the one in Long Eaton was built in a similar style.
Since that trip I have discovered that Trent Station, once an important Midland Railway junction, was not by the cottages but a little further down the line. So I will have to go back and photograph the arch that is the only thing that marks the site on public land.
The Sawley Junction is a bit bigger than the smallest micros, but it’s still only one room and very smartly laid out. You immediately feel comfortable in it.
The station was known as Sawley Junction until 1968. There have been several other stations in Long Eaton over the years, all of them better placed to serve the town.
This is a classic "tin tabernacle" building, with a central porch, sides of four bays, each with a window, and painted pale blue. According to The Long Eaton and Sawley Archive the building started life as a Railway Mission, for which meetings were held in Midland Street.
This cause became defunct, and the building and its furnishings were purchased by the United Gospel Mission, who had been meeting in the former Primitive Methodist Church in Chapel Street. They renovated the Mission Hall, and re-erected it further down the same street, where it was in use for 27 years.
It is still in use as commercial premises, though it has now been painted green.
Designed by 1906, by architects Gorman and Ross of Long Eaton and built by Messrs J & J Warner of Mickleover. Above the entrance is a "mosaiced tympanum with the figure of Learning set against a golden sunburst."
The library also has a large stained glass window by Stoddart of Nottingham. ...
Awarded Grade II listing in 1986. To east of the main entrance is a pair of free-standing iron gates, all that now remains of the original Art Nouveau railings that encircled the library. These are also included in the listing.
Long Eaton is a railway town. It is crossed by a confusion of lines, some used only by goods trains, and level crossings are common.
Today, with passenger services diverted because of major improvements being undertaken at Derby station and a train derailed on the Leicester to Birmingham line, it was more confusing than usual.
Long Eaton has had stations on several sites. The one that currently carries its name is not well placed - there used to be one right in the town centre, but that line now has no scheduled passenger service.
One day soon it may be affected by the railway even more. It is planned that the HS2 line will cross the town on a high viaduct. Long Eaton is far from the Home Counties where a fortune is being spent on limiting the line's visual and aural impact.
The construction of HS2 - though I would not bet your house on track being laid north of Birmingham any time soon - will also see the demolition of Trent Cottages, which stand next to the old Trent Power Box beside the main line to Nottingham.
I notice them every time I catch a train there, and today I found my way to them on foot.
Long Eaton's most remarkable station was Trent, which stood a little way outside the town. The Midland Railway had a habit of building large junction stations in the middle of nowhere.
I had always assumed that it was sited at Trent Cottages, but the Trent Station site locates it further out of Long Eaton.
I reached Long Eaton station without much money and had to find an ATM before I headed for Trent Lock.
There was a garage in the distance. Maybe it would have one? It did and, as a reward for my enterprise, there was a tin tabernacle across the road.
St Mary's, Sawley, made the BBC News Derbyshire pages in 2011 when it was announced that £100,000 was to be spent on it.
That report quoted the Revd Alicia Petty:
"It was the custom, at the beginning of the 20th Century, for churches to set up little tin hut buildings and they were sometimes used for youth clubs or Sunday school or even to establish a mission church, which is what ours was here for.
"The idea was that they would be replaced eventually with brick buildings.
"Somewhere along the line that plan fell to dust here."
I liked Shardlow, where the Derwent and the Trent and Mersey Canal join the River Trent. So yesterday I visited Trent Lock, five miles to the east, where the Erewash Canal and the River Soar join it.
The walk down the canal from Long Eaton station deserves a post of its own, but Trent Lock was also more interesting and attractive than I expected.
Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station dominates the view from the other side of the river, and I once named the Trent Viaducts, which take the Midland main line across it, as one of my five favourite bridges. Thee is a weir beneath them that boats heading north avoid by using the artificial Cranfleet Cut.
Their are two pubs and a tearoom by the lock where the canal enters the Trent. The Erewash (pronounced as three syllables, please) was built to serve the area's coal mines, and one day I will go to Great Northern Basin where it ends.
The mouth of the River Soar is the other side of the river from Trent Lock, but easily seen thanks to a helpful narrow boat.
Let's leave the last word to Auden and Isherwood in the Dog Beneath the Skin (though I think these lines were lifted by the former from a contemporary topographical writer):
As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out
of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.
