Posted: Sun 24 Mar, 2013 9:39 pm
ABBEY LIGHT RAILWAYPeter Lowe, its proprietor, died in October, and the railway hasn’t operated since. The lease on the land had run out some time ago and Peter had been unable to persuade Leeds City Council to renew it. Attempts by his son Craig met with similar lack of success. The Railway Inspectorate was insisting on extensive, and expensive, remedial works, yet the income from fares had been barely enough to cover the public liability insurance.In short, the railway was Peter’s hobby and he bankrolled it. Without him it could not continue and the support team who had helped him run the line were left without a railway to support. Unscrupulous individuals had been seen lurking round and items were beginning to disappear.A chance meeting (on the No.6 bus) between Craig and local Welsh Highland Railway member John Holmes (Peter was also a WHR member) led to a rescue plan being hatched. John liaised with WHR colleagues and a deal was struck with Peter’s family. The WHR would purchase all the railway’s surviving assets, including Peter’s wonderful collection of locomotives and rolling stock. These would be taken to safekeeping on other railways and the track would be removed as required by the lease. An outstanding bill for parts for a loco under restoration would be settled.Starting on Friday 15 February, Welsh Highland members from Yorkshire and the Midlands gathered at the Bridge Road depot. A team from Hampshire appeared with lorries and tools to start lifting the rails for another private railway. All the stock was taken out of the sheds and work started to clear unwanted items and machinery. Representatives from the Middleton and Festiniog Railways and others came to look at equipment that they might be able to use and hard decisions were made as to what would be kept and what sold to finance the project. Several lorry loads of unwanted metal went off to the scrapyard.During the following week, a locomotive on loan from Yorkshire Water departed for Embsay and others went to the Poppleton Community Nursery Railway at York and the Ripon & District Light Railway. The coaches went off to the North Ings Farm Museum line in Lincolnshire. On the Friday morning a trio of lorries arrived from Wales, lifted the remaining locomotives, some machines and the turntable over the fence into the BHS (ex-Clover, ex-Thrift Stores) car park and took them off to safety, arriving at Porthmadog on the Saturday morning.Into the second week and, the track having been cleared as far as the depot, the bridge over the Goit was taken out and started its long journey to China. The Hampshire team returned and lifted the rest of the track, and a posting on Freecycle resulted in crowds of local people and gardeners collecting scrap sleepers for new uses or firewood (out of the whole railway barely a dozen sleepers were re-usable).The third and final week saw a team from Brotherton’s (scrap merchants) dismantle the big shed which had been unable to find a new owner; by the end of the week nothing remained but a few sleepers and the shed foundations.So ended one of Leeds’s hidden transport gems. Or did it? You can still ride on the coaches, travel behind the locomotives and marvel at Peter Lowe’s restoration skills. The May Gala at the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway will see many of the locos running again before some of them head off to pastures new and form a continuing memorial to a skilled and wonderful man. And who knows? Maybe some day someone else will have a vision of a little railway in the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey. Stranger things have happened.