19 September 2006
South Gloucestershire Council has launched a booklet to encourage people to use the Dramway - the 19th-century 'tramway' once used to transport coal from pits nine miles north of Bristol to the River Avon - as a recreational walk.
As Our first local 'railway', the historic Dramway certainly deserves room in the history books. Its construction straddled that period between horse-drawn transport, such as carts and canal barges, and the newly invented steam engine.
As these hungry monsters became commonplace in industry, the problem of transporting the vast amounts of coal they demanded became critical. It has been estimated that, by the 1820s, Bristol's requirement of coal stood at an incredible 650 tons a day. To get this to the city required roughly 130 horse-drawn wagons. It was a costly business.
Most early solutions revolved around water-borne transport, but by the early 19th century horse-drawn 'wagonways' - early railways - were being pioneered. These 'wagonways' weren't a new idea - entrepreneur millionaire Ralph Allen had used them to transport stone from his Bath mines - but the use of iron rails was quite novel.
After two false starts, in 1803 and 1826, it was decided to build a horse-drawn track from Ram Hill pit - near Coalpit Heath - to a wharf on the River Avon near Keynsham. By 1828, plans for both an Avon and Gloucestershire Railway (A and GR) and a Bristol and Gloucestershire Railway (B and GR) had been approved.
Three years later a 'wagonway' - which ran from the mines at Hole Lane Pit and Siston Hill down to the river - opened for traffic. Fully loaded trucks, with flanged wheels, would trundle down a 400ft gradient by gravity - with, of course, a 'brake man' to control the descent - and then be pulled back, when empty, by horse power.
With a 4ft 8in gauge cast iron track with passing places, held down on sunken limestone blocks, no conventional sleepers were needed. It proved a great success with nearly 3,000 tons of coal traversing the Dramway, as it was named, in 12 months.
In 1835, another line - branching off at Mangotsfield and leading through a tunnel at Staple Hill to a place called Cuckolds Pill, next to Bristol's Avon Street - was completed. It was now planned to extend the track towards Gloucester and in 1839, with the assistance of the GWR, the Bristol and Gloucester Railway Company was formed. It was decided that this new railway would be built to Brunel's 7ft broad gauge and so, in 1844, the northern section of the Dramway - between Shortwood and its junction with Ram Hill Pit - was converted to this width.
It became the first stretch of railway in the country to be dual gauge.
In 1845, the Bristol section of the line was sold to the Midland Railway (later the LMS), who ran it until 1923.
But the older Avon and Somerset track, not converted to steam use, never had steam locos running on it. By 1843, it was only carrying about 204 tons of coal a week and this slow pace continued until about 1850.
The Kennet and Avon Canal company, who transported coal to Bath and even to faraway London, took over the running of the line until, in 1852, they too, were bought out, this time by the all powerful Great Western Railway. As the canal company already owned the Avon and Gloucestershire Railway, that, too, passed into GWR ownership.
Then, in 1864, the Midland Railway decided to build a branch line from Mangotsfield to Bath. In 1867, after the GWR had decided that the Dramway was no longer needed, the final wagon-load of coal left Hole Lane Pit.
However, this wasn't quite the end of the story.
In 1876 - many years after the track had been abandoned - entrepreneur Abraham Fussell founded the Oldland Colliery Company. He deepened the old Blowbottom Shaft and renamed it 'California' in the optimistic belief that - just like the gold prospectors in the US and Australia - he could make a fortune.
Needing to get his coal to the Bristol markets, Fussell decided to connect his colliery to the derelict Dramway which lay across the Willsbridge valley,on the other side of the Siston brook. The colliery owner built a new branch of the Dramway, routing it from his colliery down a 1 in 10 incline, across the brook and on a bridge to connect with the main steam railway route.
The junction was built in such a way that any 'runaways' on the incline would be diverted uphill where it was hoped they would come to a natural halt, rather than careering downhill out of control. The whole works - which included a new wharf at Willsbridge on the River Avon - were completed by 1881.
But in the spring of 1904 a flood burst through California Colliery, and although no lives were lost, the catastrophe bankrupted the company. The pit was finished and 100 years ago this summer the Dramway was officially closed, never to reopen.
Not much now remains of this historic track. Most of the unique 15ft-long cast iron fish-belly lines went for scrap in both world wars, although some can still be found along the Avon towpath. In 1935, the GWR sold the section of the track between California Colliery and Willsbridge to Bristol Waterworks, who used it to lay a water main. The spectacular 60ft-deep cutting and 475ft-long tunnel near Willsbridge Mill - once used as a wartime air raid shelter and later a mushroom farm - has been closed off by Bristol Water, but wharves, weighbridges and the house built for the railway engineer, as well as some stables and old workshops, can still be seen along the riverside.
It was officially closed, never to reopen, 100 years ago.
