Sixty years after closure of the Hayling Island branch in November 1963, Andrew Britton recalls a 1960 trip on this much-loved railway from the mainland at Havant and onto Hayling Island for its beach.
The voice on the platform boomed out, ‘Havant for Hayling; Havant for Hayling’. It was a stifling and sticky summer Sunday in June 1960. With my towel and bathers safely tucked in my duffel bag hidden under a bottle of Vimto, a brown paper bag containing a melting Mars bar and a cheese and onion sandwich, I set off excitedly down the platform at Havant station with my auntie Jean and two cousins, focused on plunging into the sea to cool off at the beach at Hayling Island, but my eyes caught sight of a cloud of black coal smoke floating across the platform. My ears pricked up as I heard a gentle simmering sound – the air was full of that unmistakeable magical aroma of hot oil and steam, but where was the source? As the dark cloud lifted, it gently revealed the unmistakable outline of a former London, Brighton & South Coast Railway ‘Terrier’ 0-6-0T waiting with three BR crimson-liveried Southern Region carriages.
All thoughts of a dip in the sea soon evaporated in the summer sunshine as I made my acquaintance with driver Herbert Outen on No 32650. It had always been my dream to ride behind a ‘Brighton Terrier’ tank on the Isle of Wight lines, but I was too late on the scene as the last of them had sailed back across the Solent in 1949 to be replaced on the Ventnor (West) branch by Adams ‘O2’ 0-4-4 tanks. To my surprise, busily stoking the fire of No 32650 at Havant was the on-loan (from Ryde St John’s Road shed on the Isle of Wight) fireman Ray ‘Joe’ Maxfield!
Reminiscing at Ventnor station in the mid-1960s about his loan to Fratton shed and working the ‘Terriers’’ the, by then, passed fireman Ray Maxfield recalled that working
