Rescue timetable for Rosedale's old railway

Zoom in on the 1890 photograph of Blakey Junction and it's difficult not to feel an unsettling mixture of delight at seeing a familiar place 120 years ago and sadness because the homes which the children once played in are now demolished and forgotten.

Take a look at the porch curtains, the cultivated gardens, the housewives at their gates and the railway perilously close to the houses. A well-dressed miner smiles at the camera, and 10 other members of the Rosedale mining community look on.

They were better paid than the average Victorian labourer but they were piteously poor by our standards. Did they know the extent of the global power generated by their hard graft?

In 1870 Britain supplied about half of the iron and steel consumed by the world, and 38 per cent of that came from North Yorkshire and Cleveland.

Sydney Harbour Bridge, for example, was constructed of iron products made by Dorman Long and Co of Middlesbrough in 1922 when the Rosedale mines were still in operation.

The railway over the moor transported eleven million tons of ironstone out of Rosedale but today only the dilapidated calcining kilns and the railway track bed of that great Victorian industry remain.

Over the next six months a group of committed amateur historians will be devoting hundreds of hours' work to the Rosedale Railway 150 project in an attempt to collate all the facts and information on the period before it disappears into oblivion.

The Kirby, Great Broughton, and Ingleby Greenhow Local History Group have joined forces with historians in Farndale and with the Pickering, and the Rosedale History Society to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Rosedale mines on March 27, next year

The celebrations start next week on December 3 with a fancy dress and Victorian feast at Kirby and they culminate with a roast beef anniversary dinner for 150 guests at The Lion Inn at Blakey. There will also be guided walks and cycle rides along the old railway route, and a leaflet explaining the history of the mines. There's also a celebration cycle ride along the railway route on May 15.

But the showpiece and the main legacy of all this work will be a "living" community website with all the vast and growing data collated. It will include over 400 pictures, old recordings of miners' memories courtesy of the Beck Isle Museum in Pickering, maps and drawings from the North Yorkshire County Records Office and an animated account of how the railway worked with help from Teeside University students. The website went live this month and appeals for people to add their memories and pictures to it.

Four hundred pictures have been collected by a retired chemist, Malcolm Bisby of Kildale. His admiration for the old railway stems from 50 years of walking, studying, and giving talks about it.

Built for 24,500 by North Eastern Railway Company contractors, it was 19 kilometres of standard gauge track across the harsh North York Moors, taking in a steep incline to the top of an escarpment 418 metres above sea level.

It was the second highest railway route in England. Malcolm Bisby explains: "The incline was almost a mile and a vertical height of 800 feet (244 metres]. It is unprecedented even now. The cables were 1,630 yards long (1,490 metres] and over one inch in diameter and each cable weighed eight tons. The drums they wound on were 14 feet (four metres] in diameter and they were made of cast iron. In 1869 the brakes, which were made of wood, caught fire with the friction and destroyed the brake drum house. So they had to rebuild and they used cast iron brake bands. They installed two extra cast iron drums. It was all experimental at the time by guess and God, but it worked extremely well and was a triumph."

Gravity did all the hard work. As wagons loaded with ironstone were lowered down, empty wagons were hauled up.

It was environmentally friendly, points out the history group's chairman Geoff Taylor, a former Tees river pilot. In the same way, he rationalises, the Victorian exploitation of Rosedale has left "an amazing, positive green legacy" which mirrors the way the miners used nature to help them take the iron out of the ground.

Today Rosedale is a beautiful, tranquil place for walkers. At the peak of mining operations the valley was shrouded in perpetual smog from the ever-burning calcining kilns which removed waste materials from the raw ironstone before it was taken to the blast furnaces in Consett and Ferryhill, near Durham.

Tourists can walk along the circular dismantled railway track from Rosedale to Blakey and explore the old, deteriorating kilns and miners' cottages. The track drainage and culverts are still in good condition and stabilization work has been done on the kilns by the North York Moors National Park and English Heritage.

There's passionate talk of reinstating the railway to join up with the existing Esk Valley line between Whitby and Battersby. But it's a romantic dream, says Malcolm Bisby.The history group would also like to know more about the miners' working conditions and the mining community itself.

Harsh winters in the late 19th century, for example, led to Ingleby Incline Bank Top's four houses being nick-named "Little Siberia". Accident rates were usually high during railway construction and injured navvies or their dependants received no compensation or help from employers.

Boys as young as five years of age were employed as "wagon boys" and were often injured or killed when a wagon or a horse ran out of control.

www.rosedalerailway.org.uk or www.kgbighistory.org.uk. Telephone contacts 01642 711741 or 01642 712458.

Gripping story of iron men and women

In 1853 two large deposits of magnetic ironstone were discovered near Hollins farm, Rosedale, by William Thompson, a Staithes fish merchant and ironstone shipper, and Matthew Snowden, a Whitby timber importer and ironstone exporter. They recruited a group of shareholders to exploit their valuable find but were eventually cheated out of their rightful share.

The mining operations started in 1856, yielding ironstone with up to 60 per cent content, an unheard of figure for ironstone from the North Yorkshire and Cleveland district.

The stone was magnetic because it contained such a high content of iron. The iron, which was called magnetite, was chemically different to other forms of ironstone found in the UK.

It was transported by horse and cart to the nearest railhead in Pickering. The "roads" quickly deteriorated and work on a railway commenced in January 1860. Conditions were harsh but the work did not stop even after 40 navvies nearly died after being trapped in huts on the moor by a blizzard which left them imprisoned without food or heat at the Esklets, at the head of Westerdale. Peak production at Hollins, Sheriff's Pit and the Rosedale east mines in 1873 was 560,668 tons. Rosedale's population had grown from around 548 to 2,839 people. A typical navvy consumed around a kilo of beef and six litres of beer a day. Rosedale villagers would cadge lifts to Stockton for Saturday market and visits to Stokesley fair and show, a cricket team was given a ride, and Rosedale children at the top of the incline used the railway to reach their school in Farndale.

After the last shift on Saturday, the mine managers always left one brake van at Blakey Junction but every Sunday morning the van was always found 7 km down the gradient at Rosedale East. They knew the miners used to spend Saturday nights drinking at The Lion Inn at Blakey and turned a blind eye to them hitching a free lift home.

A small railway community lived in the 16 railway cottages at Bank Top, Rosedale. Only four of these cottages now remain and the last of the Rosedale Railway engine drivers, "Willy" Wood, lived in number 16 until his death in 1963.

On June 8, 1929, the last locomotive was lowered down the Ingleby Incline. The stone engine shed on the line at Bank Top, Rosedale West, was dismantled in 1938/39, transported to Hutton-le-Hole and rebuilt as the village hall.

Kitchen agony of miner George

"This is the kitchen table that George Bailey had his leg cut off on," reads the carving on the drawer bottom of an old table. George "Peg Leg" Bailey's story came to light at a sales room in the 1980s. Radio reported the find and George's great-granddaughter, June Marsden, of Great Ayton confirmed it was true. George had his leg amputated on the table after a roof fall in the mines smashed his leg on New Year's Eve, 1894. Rosedale was snowed in and so the journey to hospital was out of the question. George survived and, with a wooden leg, continued working for the Rosedale mine company.

CW 27/11/10