Viewed from high ground just south of Hest Bank station, Stanier ‘Black Five’ No 44943 makes for Morecambe having just crossed over to join the single-track link to Bare Lane Junction and the seaside town that gave its name to the vast bay providing the backdrop to this scene - it is 120 square miles, is notorious in parts for quicksand, and receives the waters of five main rivers, from the Wyre to the Leven, high tides lapping close to Hest Bank station. The view is undated but in the down yard are five camping coaches, an increase on earlier numbers, and the arrival of concrete troughing ready for cable runs was in hand hereabouts by early September 1966, so the train is likely a summer duty in 1966 or 1967 and the 4-6-0 is either on the books of Farnley Junction shed or after its transfer to Holbeck, from where it would be withdrawn in October 1967. Generally speaking, trains on the ex-L&NWR line from here to Morecambe used the Midland Railway’s Promenade station after mid-September 1958. The exception was in busy times such as high summer, when the L&NWR’s nearby Euston Road terminus saw use until it was phased out in 1962 and closed in 1963.
Icannot remember when I first heard about Hest Bank, it was possibly something passed on to me by fellow trainspotters, but suffice to say that, living in Bradford, there was a regular train service to Morecambe and I saw the morning ‘Residential’ pass my school in Keighley each morning. Several of my friends arrived from Settle and Skipton on that morning train, and I was told of businessmen travelling from Morecambe and shaving on the train while on their way to work in Bradford or Leeds. The ‘Residential’ was a busy service in those days when few people had cars.
Like so many other trains on the line through Keighley in the early 1950s, the ‘Residential’ was usually headed by a former LMS 4-4-0 Compound and it was inevitable that the school holidays soon found me taking a similar service the other way round, to Morecambe (Promenade) station and walking north along the coast road to the one place where the West Coast main line ran by the sea on Morecambe Bay - Hest Bank. There wasn’t anybody else there, just a cutting breeze off the sea behind me and a signal box across the tracks. What had I travelled all this way to see?
Very soon the signals raised for the down line, and a distant roar from the Lancaster direction soon materialized into a northbound express headed by brand new British Railways Standard ‘8P’ Pacific locomotive No 71000 Duke of Gloucester. The green paint was new and rich, and the double blastpipe roared like nothing I could remember. I will never forget that moment - and then it was gone, together with over a dozen red and cream-liveried Mk I coaches. Duke of Gloucester worked from Crewe North shed in that first month of revenue earning service, and I well remember too that it wasn’t even in the listing of my latest Ian Allan abc spotters book yet!
Although many Stanier Pacifics passed in both directions through the day, that first impression set me coming back to Hest Bank several times a year for over a decade. Strangely, very few spotters were there to see all these expresses at full speed on the level main line between Carnforth and Lancaster, but as the years went by, the embankment and the platform became well-populated with lads of a similar age to myself. Sometimes we laid pennies on the rails and the signalman across the way never seemed to be bothered. Finding the flattened coins after a train had passed was tedious, but we were safe with signals at north and south giving us due warning to stay on the fence until the trains had gone by. It was a privilege, back then, to have coins that had been flattened by so many famous locomotives.