Wissington Whiteout

East Anglia is a part of England that I have visited very infrequently. One time was on 29 November 1969, a long cross-country journey by car with the aim of visiting Wissington Sugar Factory in deepest Norfolk. The harvest of sugar beet was in full swing from around October and there were quite a number of rail connected processing factories owned by the British Sugar Corporation around the UK.

In the days before motorways and fast dual-carriageway roads we made slow and tortuous progress over to Norfolk. The journey was broken by a call at Barrington Cement Works in Cambridgeshire where we saw the sole steam loco, an Avonside 0-4-0ST, dead, with four diesels at work. Apparently the steamer had been in use two weeks earlier.

We should really have turned round and gone back home with the weather rapidly deteriorating, but pressed on to our destination, arriving at Wissington in a snowstorm. It was bleak to say the least.

But there was rail activity at the factory, the appropriately named 'WISSINGTON' - Hudswell Clarke 1700 of 1938, but looking much older - was slowly placing full wagons of sugar beet over the weighbridge as the snow swirled around. A  diesel was also working and two more steamers were in the shed area. One was an ancient Manning, Wardle 1532 of 1901 named 'NEWCASTLE' ^, while the other was Andrew Barclay 2248 of 1948, a recent incomer from BSC Kidderminster, where I saw it working two years earlier. The photo below shows it shunting at Kidderminster on 3 December 1967.

We did not hang around too long at Wissington, as the snow was still falling. Somewhere I remember we stopped for some delicious fish and chips.

On the return journey, we called at British Steel Corporation's Corby Works - the last big steelworks in the UK to use steam locos. British Steel Corporation was formed when the steel industry was nationalised in 1967, Corby Works previously belonged to Stewarts and Lloyds.

Despite being a Saturday afternoon there was plenty of activity and we saw four steam engines at work. However, enthusiasts were not welcome so we watched, not daring to produce a camera, and trying to stay inconspicuous to avoid detection by security. The locos,painted yellow to be easily seen in the works, were oil burning 0-6-0ST constructed by Hawthorn, Leslie and its successor Robert Stephenson & Hawthorns. One was working wagons full of hot molten metal, one was on six hopper wagons, another had flat wagons loaded with steel and the last was shunting empties.

More about steam at Corby Works, which lasted until June 1973, is here https://www.irsociety.co.uk/Archives/37/Corby.htm

Corby Quarries used to have a separate allocation of around twenty steam engines at its extensive and modern loco shed but became fully dieselised in January 1969 with a job lot of almost new ex-British Railways D95XX 0-6-0s.  (See 'Central England Industrial Steam' for an earlier visit.)

We carried on to another British Sugar factory, Woodston near Peterborough, where Hudswell Clarke 1800 of 1947 was busy bringing coal wagons from the exchange sidings to the factory with wagonloads of beet the other way. The weather had improved somewhat by this time, and the snow was more or less gone.

HC 1800 was quite smartly kept, painted blue with red rods*.

Footnotes:

British Sugar Corporation owned all eighteen sugar beet processing factories in the UK.

^ 'NEWCASTLE' had a Gloucestershire connection, it worked at the Ministry of Munitions factory at Quedgeley, near Gloucester in 1917/18.

* HC 1800 became famous in the preservation era as 'Thomas the Tank Engine' so its blue livery in 1969 was a portent of its future!

All four British Sugar locos mentioned have been preserved, as has the Barrington Cement Avonside. Unfortunately none of the British Steel steam locos we saw that afternoon are preserved.