North Weald: Stepping Back Into History

In October 2005 I took a train ride from Ongar on the “newly-formed” Epping and Ongar Railway and, alighting at North Weald for the first time, stepped back into history. It was here that my great grandfather, John Dawes, son of a tradesman in Trumpington, Cambridgeshire, became a railway porter in 1877. This was only a few years after the branch line from Epping to Ongar had opened. John spent the remainder of his working life working on the railway - but that’s a different story for another time.

The Eastern Counties Railway opened a line out of Shoreditch, from Stratford to Loughton in 1856, with the intention of reaching Epping. Later the company was taken over by the Great Eastern Railway (1862) who planned an extension to Ongar with ambitions to reach either Chelmsford or Great Dunmow.

The route opened in 1865, but the addition from Epping to Ongar remained only a branch line. When through trains ran from Liverpool Street, carriages were often left off at Epping. Had Ongar been the original objective, the line would have been easier to build up the Roding valley rather than over high ground. But Epping was a more attractive destination.

In 1935, the line became part of the London Transport Modernisation Plan and after the Second World War was “attached” to the Central Line. Tube trains began to operate as far as Epping in 1949 but it was to be a further eight years before the branch to Ongar was electrified. Push – pull steam trains worked the route. Never having high passenger numbers, its fate seems to have been doomed by a decision not to build an electricity sub-station at Blake Hall. This meant insufficient power so longer trains from the metropolis could not be used over the full distance. Passengers had to change at Epping. From then the branch was the only single-track section on the underground network, and at North Weald, the only place where there was a level crossing. With dwindling patronage the branch finally succumbed to closure on 30 September 1994, but not without several fights from rail users. Blake Hall Station, the most rural on the entire London Transport network, had closed some ten years before.

The architecture of the line is not without interest. The stations - Ongar, Blake Hall, North Weald and Epping – are all of the same style. Blake Hall is the most decorative country station in red and white brick. North Weald is the same as its neighbour but plainer. Ongar is a modest terminus and Epping has additional building on the east side, or London-bound platform. Just outside Ongar, a viaduct spans Cripsey brook.

Whether there was, and remains, anything romantic about this branch is a matter individuals’ will decide, but it forms part of my Essex roots. If the Eastern Countries Railway preferred Ongar as a destination to Epping, the High Country parishes would not have been so rural. Had the post war Abercrombie Plan for a new town at Ongar been approved – rather than Basildon – the line may have remained open today with fast electric trains to Chelmsford.


Bibliography:
Newens, Arthur Stanley. A History of North Weald Bassett and Its People (Nuclear Printing and Publishing Co Ltd, 1985)
Various writers. Aspects of the History of Ongar (Ongar Millennium History Project, 1999)
Letter to ‘Essex Countryside’. January 1962