Accrington Railways - Robert Kenyon

local agent, in order to balance their vending machines’ books. He claimed the deficit had been caused by his colleagues getting chocolate and drinks out of these machines without paying. November A new train service was to be started on Monday the 6 th , at 06:07 to connect in Preston with a London train, which would arrive in Euston at 10:00. This would make a day trip to the Capital a viable proposition for a businessman. December At the very end of the year proposals, which included the closures of Church & Oswaldtwistle, Rishton and Huncoat stations, along with several other stations on the Skipton to Blackpool line, were amongst proposals placed before Barbara Castle. If approval was granted, it would trigger off a whole round of inquiries at which objections could be raised. If these plans came to fruition not only would these stations lose their passenger and parcels services, but Huncoat would also lose its goods handling facilities. There was also bound to be a number of staff redundancies. It was stated by BR, that there were adequate bus services which would serve these communities sufficiently well, whilst the amount of parcels traffic was extremely small. There was bound to be vociferous opposition to these closures in Huncoat especially, where they could have an adverse effect on the development of the new industrial estate and all the industries for which good rail communications were an important factor. In 1967 a further 4 sets of units were allocated to ACCRINGTON depot from Newton Heath shed, then coded 9D, as follows - Clas s DMBS – DMCL New Withdrawn Scrapped by 112 M 51682 – M51707 August 1959 Nov. 1968 King, Wymondham 112 M51684 – M51710 August 1959 Nov. 1969 King, Wymondham & Bird, Long Marston 112 M51685 – M51711 August 1959 Nov. 1968 Steelbreaking, Chesterfield & King, Wymondham 112 M51686 – M51712 August 1959 Nov. 1969 Derby C & W Works & Cohen, Kettering During 1968 ACCRINGTON lost a substantial amount of its DMU allocation to 14A shed Cricklewood. This included cars M51687 to 51697 , M51700 / 1 , M51713 to 51721 and 51725 to 51727 . ( A total of 27 carriages equal to 13½ units .) Very few modifications were made to the Accrington Motive Power Depot to cope with servicing and maintaining Diesel Multiple Units from the facilities used during the days of steam operation. However, as the need for coaching stock diminished the carriage sheds situated further up the yard toward the station came into greater use for the cleaning, servicing and stabling these units. Of course due to the wider range of operations undertaken by this new form of traction, several ‘other’ types of DMU’s appeared in Accrington, which were not allocated to the shed. Chiefly these were Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagon units of Class 110, but it was not unusual to find Derby ‘lightweight’ sets appearing from time to time. 1968 ( Under Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, the fourth Act concerning the railways since the Second World War set about wiping off BR’s £153 million debt in order to give greater support to uneconomic lines. It also set up the Passenger Transport Executives with powers to co-ordinate transport services within their areas . Whether it was an edict from the Board of BR, an economy measure or the stationmaster acting upon his own initiative, advertisements promoting trips by train, excursions or holiday specials, ceased to appear in the local press. One must assume that bills were posted up at the stations in order to inform the public of any other than service trains . Barbara Castle, the MP for Blackburn, who had been appointed Minister of Transport in December, 1965, placed a moratorium on any further of the closures listed in Beeching’s report ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, although she allowed those closures which had already commenced to stay in force. Of these the Colne to Skipton section was not included, although the section between Accrington and Bury was, and it was already too late to save the passenger link. The freight only service to Rawtenstall would continue for some time .) However by the end of 1967 only 4% of all passenger trains were steam hauled and only 13% of all freights. Even though it was towards the end of steam Accrington played host to many aging steam locomotives from classes which were not usually seen in the town even in the halcyon days of steam. These included the Britannia Pacifics, the Standard Class 2-10-0 freight locos, Scots, Patriots and Jubilees many of the named locomotives devoid of their nameplates, one of the most auspicious occurred on

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