GONE FOR SCRAP

0KING’S YARD, HALL RD, NORWICH

With British Railways’ modernisation programme gathering pace, there were large numbers of steam engines going to the breaker’s yard in the mid 1960s. Norwich took its share. Steam engines had aleady disappeared from East Anglian railway lines by the time Archie King set up his yard for scrap locomotives, but those from other regions arrived for breaking up. Archie King may have retired by then, with the business already taken over by Harry Serruys, but we still called it King’s scrap yard. He had some sidings off Hall Road near where Virgin Money opened their local offices many years later. These sidings have vanished as utterly as the engines which once (briefly) stood there. They were accessed from the mainline to London, a few hundred yards before reaching the Markshall viaduct.

GWR 6100 class Prarie tank for scrap. Aug 63

This part of Hall Road was seeing rapid changes. Only a few years before the appearance of the railway scrap yard, the Cattle Market had moved there from the centre of Norwich, into a modern looking area of animal pens and a brand spanking new corn hall. As early as 1943 it was recommended that the Cattle Market should move out to the site on Hall Road. The first factory to occupy the site on Hall Road, just across the Ring Road from the Tuckswood pub, was the works put up by Mason & Gantlett Ltd (my father’s company) to manufacture the Versator lens generating machine. This would have been ten years before the cattle market was moved there. Before that this land had been occupied by allotments.

Today the Tuckswood pub has gone, to be replaced by a filing station and a branch of Macdonald’s; Mason and Gantlett’s (later Culver’s) factory has become the car park for a retail park and the cattle market is a sad shadow of its former self. As for the railway sidings, you cannot now tell even where they once were.

GWR CASTLE at Hall Road

The locomotives came from all over the country. Those in the pictures accompanying this article were GWR engines, but a week or two earlier they had all been ex-LMS locomotives awaiting the attentions of the acetylene torch. This batch included everything from small 0-6-0 tank engines from West Country branch lines up to Castle class locomotives of the premier expresses. These latter ones of the Castle class had their distinctive bent blast pipes, which you can see illustrated here. These were shared with the most powerful GWR class, the Kings.

THE CATTLE MARKET IN HALL ROAD

All name and number plates, which would have identified the engines, had been removed for sale to collectors, but any painted on numbers naturally remained, and these would also have made identification possible. There were no painted numbers that I could see on the Castle locomotive, although we know from other sources what it may have been.  In the early months of 1963 (when these pictures were taken) these Castle class locomotives were scrapped at Archie King’s yard; Compton Castle, Newport Castle and G. J. Churchward, named after the designer himself. Churchward had designed the Castle class engines, although he had retired by the time they appeared on the GWR. Why they travelled so far east to end their days I do not know, but at least their demise was quick. At Barry in South Wales their fate would have been dragged out for years, the hulks slowly rusting away before eventually being reduced to pieces ready for the smelter. On the plus side, it gave enthusiasts time to raise funds to save some of the locomotive, and many were eventually preserved.

Our part of the Eastern Region had been among the first to loose steam traction. By 1963 there was none left in Norfolk or Suffolk, and few in Cambridgeshire. The only sight in the way of steam engines was the arrival of a train of derelict locomotives on their last journey to King’s scrap yard. Their piston rods had been removed to reduce friction from the valve gear, prior to their final passage along the rails to their ultimate fate. In less than five years they had all gone.

JOSEPH MASON

THE BLOG FOR MEMORIES OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE

joemasonspage@gmail.com