LEISTON WORKS RAILWAY
Preservation’s newest (and currently shortest) standard gauge heritage railway – the Leiston Works Railway – celebrates the special relationship between steam on rails and steam on the road. Steam Railway finds out more.
It always surprises your author at how little crossover there is between the rail and road steam fraternities. Ostensibly, they have much in common; Richard Trevithick’s trail-blazing Pen-y-Darren locomotive was born out of his earlier experimental road steamers, and his final railway engine – 1808’s Catch Me Who Can – was very similar to his first full-size locomotive, the ill-fated Puffing Devil road engine of 1801.
Several traction engine manufacturers – most notably Aveling & Porter – built railway locomotives (essentially, traction engines fitted with flanged wheels to enable them to work on rails) and the respective rail and road steam preservation movements both started in the early 1950s. Today, numerous heritage lines hold road steam events, and a locomotive may also occasionally act as a hefty payload for one or more traction engines at a steam rally. But there the relationship pretty much ends.
The place where the crossover between road and rail steam is perhaps most closely seen is in the small Suffolk market town of Leiston, which was home to agricultural machinery and traction engine manufacturer Richard Garrett & Sons Ltd, whose works were connected to the Great Eastern Railway’s Aldeburgh branch via a short standard gauge line. Initially worked by horses, the line was later home to one of Aveling & Porter’s railway traction engines, Sirapite, which shuttled up and down this branch until retirement in 1962.
Today, Leiston is home to Britain’s newest and shortest standard gauge preserved line – the Leiston Works Railway – which, when it opens to passengers, will celebrate the special relationship between rail and road steam.
Richard the Third
The story of the Leiston Works Railway is inextricably tied to Richard Garrett & Sons Ltd. The works were founded in 1778 by Richard Garrett to make chaff cutters, scythes and sickles, and were subsequently expanded by his son – also called Richard.
The surviving works as we know them today were the brainchild of Richard Garrett III, grandson of the firm’s founder. In 1851, Garrett exhibited the company’s wares at the Great Exhibition at Crystal P
