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Building the last Main Line Railway
Introduction
Life Through a Lens: Sydney Walter Alfred
Newton
The majority of the photographs seen in the Great Central's
Building the last Main Line Railway section of the website were taken by
SWA Newton who was born in Argylle Street, Leicester in 1875. His father,
Alfred, ran a small photographic business in 19 Belvoir Street, Leicester with
the family living above the shop. Unfortunately, a fire in an adjacent factory
caused a wall to collapse on the Belvoir Street shop, and the business was
forced to relocate to 17 King Street. To the late Victorians, photography was
still thought of as novel and exclusive, and Alfred did a roaring trade as a
portrait photographer. However, this was not the only line of business
concentrated on and, for many years, Alfred Newton & Son was the official
photographer to the Leicester Museums - helping to record and document many
objects and artefacts.
Sydney joined the family firm in the early 1890's, shortly
before work began building the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire
Railway's London Extension which linked Nottingham, Leicester with London. When
construction of the railway began in 1894, Sydney took it upon himself to
record the work in progress. He was never the official photographer of the
company, but his own enthusiasm for this momentous engineering scheme led to
the creation, at his own expense, of a truly magnificent photographic archive.
By rail and bicycle, he travelled the length of the London Extension as the
construction progressed and photographed every aspect of its creation. He
captured the excavators, locomotives, bridges, cuttings, and also the navvies
themselves whose labour drove the line through the countryside. Indeed, workmen
often wanted photographs of themselves, and Newton would help to offset the
costs of his journey by selling these pictures to the navvies and engineers.
Together, Newton's photographs represent a compelling and unrivalled account of
social and engineering history at the end of the 19th Century.
Courtesy of
Railway
Archive
The photographs on the Railway Archive web site have very
informative captions which in many instances we have reproduced in full.
However we have added to and amended the captions of a number of the
photographs, particularly relating to building practice, to reflect information
which we have to hand and the Railway Archive's author did not. Should any
mistake come to light these must be considered as being our responsibility
alone. It is our stated practice to accommodate fluctuations in the County's
boundary line where this interrupts a route. Therefore as both Barby and
Catesby Tunnel lie on the route between Rugby and Willoughby, but lie within
Northamptonshire, we have included these for the sake of completeness. As
Staverton Signal Cabin was very close to the County's border and was the
location of many photographs, attributed to Gordon Coltas, of the many services
passing through Warwickshire, we have also included this location too. Finally
the 'Railway Archive: The Last Main Line' web site also includes photographs of
the dismantled line taken in the 1970s which we felt were very poignant and
therefore we have exceptionally extended our 1968 timeline to include a few
examples.
We have however structured the order of the photographs, see
below, relating to Warwickshire in a geographical order starting near Newton,
just inside the county's border with Leicestershire, and finishing with
Flecknoe, just before the line re-enters Northamptonshire. Select a station or
subheading to view associated images. Numbers in [brackets] specify the number
of photos on each page.
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