Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN AND THE RAILWAYS 208 CHAPTER 19/ BUCKDEN AND THE RAILWAYS Robin Gibson, with an afterword by Anne Spreckley Livestock, fruit and vicars; a most unusual milk run, and a soldier from the wars returning: in a world now lost, the railways brought Buckden to the world and the world to Buckden . ad to say, but Buckden has never had its own railway station. Certainly there was one called Buckden but it was actually just in the parish of Brampton. There was also an Offord and Buckden station on the Great Northern Railway, but that was entirely in the parish of Offord. The line serving Buckden station was the Kettering, Thrapston and Huntingdon Railway, which was worked by the Midland Railway Company (latterly the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (1923-1947), and finally the Midland Region of British Railways). This did run through Buckden parish for about 1½ miles altogether, nearly all of it single track. The only other length of track in the parish - less than a hundred yards of siding - was in the yard of the Offord and Buckden Mill. This carried goods wagons drawn by horses. Having been pedantic about the geography, it must be said that the railways were very useful to Buckden and would be yet if the stations were still open. From Buckden, the journey to Cambridge via Huntingdon, St Ives, the new town of Northstowe and the Science Park would take about 45 minutes, but that is a lost dream. If there were still a station called Offord and Buckden, the best journey time to Kings Cross would be about 50 minutes; unfortunately, it closed in 1962. 1 Offord and Buckden Station The station was opened in 1850, and extensively remodelled in May 1898 to accommodate an extra up- line. Making room for the new platform required the demolition of a footbridge and several buildings, including the booking office and the stationmaster’s house. The residents of Buckden and The Offords petitioned the Great Northern Railway directors to take advantage of the remodelling to replace the level crossing with a traffic bridge, though they did so without much hope of success: presumably they recognised the difficulties created problems presented by the river on the west side and the houses of Station Lane on the east. According to a sarcastic aside in the St. Neots Advertiser ¸ however, there was a strong possibility of a bridge being built, ‘which will be good news to the inhabitants of both these important cities.’ The bridge was not built, but arguments in favour of it were revived just over a hundred years later. In 2000, a proposal for the commercial development of Alconbury Airfield aroused fears that increasingly heavy rail and road traffic would combine to cause intolerable delays at the Offord level crossing. Buckden and other parish councils argued that a traffic bridge was the only solution. Again, no bridge was built, this time because the development stalled. Offord and Buckden was an ill-fated station for some. On the afternoon of 10 February 1853, a goods train collided head-on with a train of ballast trucks emerging from the Bowyer Brick siding south of the station. John Rigby, the goods driver, was trapped under his engine, so severely injured he was at first thought to be dead. He was dragged free by the driver and stoker of the ballast train, who had jumped clear before the crash. A pilot-engine eventually took him, not as one might expect to a hospital, but back to his home in Peterborough. (The Offord stationmaster at the time was the newly appointed Mr Edmund Cooter, 26. In June he was moved to Hornsey station. On the 31 August, Hornsey was the scene of a not-dissimilar but far graver collision that injured many. Mr Cooter found himself accused of having caused the accident by waving a coal-train into the path of an express. He was exonerated by the subsequent inquiry: it found that Great Northern, whose safety record was poor, had failed to train him properly. His career was not harmed, and he remained with the company until he retired.) At two a.m. on 30 September 1862, Buckden’s surgeon, John Newnham Woolley, was called out to the scene of a frightful accident. The engine of a coal-train approaching the station on the up-line had been 1 In the mid-1850s, the best scheduled journey time from Offord to Kings Cross was two hours thirty minutes. A non-stop special, such as the royal train, could do it in under 75 minutes. S