Woolwich Dockyard Station - railway station serving west Woolwich and serving industries on the (closed) Dockyard site

 

I don’t know if anyone has noticed that I have been looking intermittently at railway stations on the Greenwich Line. I did Maze Hill and then I sort of did Westcombe Park in articles on Coombe Farm and Westcombe Hill – and then, most recently, Charlton.  So what is next? It must be Woolwich Dockyard.  But there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot to say about it! 

The North Kent railway came here in 1849 having built the Blackheath Tunnel so trains could get to Woolwich via Charlton.  Woolwich Dockyard Station was opened between the two.  I assume it was buikt to serve the Dockyard, which was nearby - although it would be closed after only a few more years. 

The station was built in an old sand pit which it entered after a series of tunnels running under an area of more sand pits on the site which is now Maryon Park. In order to get the railway through the built up streets of Woolwich the railway was built to run underneath the town centre by use of a series of cuttings and tunnels. That is why Woolwich Dockyard's platforms are below street level.

The station was clearly built with aspirations to an importance it never achieved.  The engineer was Peter William Barlow – Woolwich born son of Professor Peter Barlow and one of a family of railway engineers.  The architect was Samuel Beazley, playwright, in his last important work, which was designing stations on this line for the South Eastern Railway. Originally there was a station building on both sides of the line with a ticket halls, offices and waiting rooms.  It was a station is ‘of some architectural note'.  It was a single storey building at street level, with an additional storey below at platform level. The platforms had ornate canopies; there was a central track foot crossing and a staircase to the "up" side.  There was no goods yard, but there were two sidings. There was a signal box at the eastern end of the "up" platform.  The station  opened with the route on 30th July 1849.

Later the station acquired a covered lattice footbridge and eventually the platforms were lengthened into one of the tunnels. When electrification came in the sidings and the signal box were closed but about 360 yards to the west of the station was a second signal box, which  remained after the one to the east had been removed.

Research in the press cuttings about any events which might have taken place at the station is dispiriting. There seems to have been an enormous number of nasty accidents some of which led to fatalities.  Some of them were people who had stuck their heads out of the window of the train as it went through the Blackheath tunnel or got out the wrong side of the train and were killed. 

There is one very dramatic newspaper story about a basket being left in station apparently holding a cat.          Station staff investigated to find six starving cats. The kind railwayman went out and bought milk and fish and reported the people who had left the basket for cruelty to animals.

When I started commuting in the early 1960s the trains on the fast route to Gravesend - the notorious 5.40 pm -  used to crawl through this section and we were in a canyon of grey brick.

At that time I had no idea what any of it was about - although I had some inkling that there were important factories nearby.   Somewhere on the route you could see two vast wooden doors over on the left side of the line. They were so huge they would have taken a whole pile of double Decker buses.  I am not sure that I really remember where they were but we used to stop just outside Woolwich Dockyard station and they may have been there. I assumed they went off to some sort of riverside works but I knew nothing about them at all.

I don't remember the signal box which the books say was east of the. Station.  They describe a single storey wooden building with a sign saying ‘Woolwich Dockyard’ on it. It controlled a single-track connection which went into the area of the old dockyard. This branch into the Dockyard ran off the "up" line going north east and subsequently plunged into a tunnel before reaching the Dockyard itself.

One of the difficulties of finding out about the rail line in Woolwich Dockyard itself is that it was actually part of the Royal Arsenal Railways. They had taken some of the Dockyard area over when it closed in the 1860s and the new internal railway was built and administered by them. However it does not seem to have been joined up with their main system on the Arsenal site itself.

The Dockyard area changed following closure. Infilling of 3 Slip opened up a long wharf frontage which could be used in conjunction with a new railway network. In 1873 a new branch line was built which passed through a tunnel from the North Kent line east of Woolwich Dockyard Station, going under the main road to link to the Dockyard.  Building this railway was a substantial undertaking that required the demolition of fourteen houses. It was designed by Maj. Peter Scratchley, Royal Engineers. He was the Inspector of Works at the Arsenal and he had overseen the installation of that site’s narrow-gauge railway.

So the line into what was the Dockyard is now a pedestrian underpass going from the Dockyard Estate through to the corner of Prospect Vale.  However that leaves the bit between the main line and what is now the underpass unaccounted for.  I remembered those huge doors being in a vast grey brick canyon -but now the bit of the line seems completely flat and open. There is no sign obvious sign at all that a branch ran off the line here or that there was a signal box.  However,  investigation in the nearby adventure playground shows a tunnel portal with gates on it - although nothing with the dramatic sense of those huge wooden gates.

Where were those gates. Did anybody ever take a photograph of them? I thought they were amazing. Prospect Vale seems a long way from Woolwich Dockyard Station. Perhaps they wefe somewhere else?

The bit of the line that went into the Dockyard is now a pedestrian subway is now locally listed as 'a rare surviving feature associated with the Royal Arsenal railway and its engineer; still in use as a pedestrian route under heavily trafficked Church Street'. A lot of that great grey brick wall is still there in roads parallel to the railway on the left of the line as you come in from Charlton.

So that was the line into Woolwich Dockyard. It seems very hard to find much out. It  is too late for the sort of maritime histories which usually describe the Royal Dockyards and ignored by Arsenal historians as not being on the main site. ‘Industrial railways of London’ mentions it in just one sentence – which says that it existed – and that is all. 

One of our local historians has drawn up a map of where the line went on the Dockyard site. It seems to have run down the line of what is now Antelope Road to the River and to have a number of short branches off to left and right– or am I misinterpreting that map?

There was a locomotive shed on site there initially for a narrow gauge line and then, another one on a different site for a standard gauge system. The railway in the dockyard area seems to have continued to operate into the late 1940s.

Woolwich Dockyard station itself has always seemed very isolated. I am not sure I have ever used it myself. Information about both the station and the internal railway on the old Dockyard  seems to be very sparse and I am very grateful to members of the Arsenal History Group who seem to be the only people who know anything about it – please let me know if there is another expert out there. 

I am told that there are still tiny remains of rails here and there on the site... Perhaps I should issue a challenge to readers – tell me if you know where they are. A photograph would be nice which we can copy to the Greenwich Industrial History face book page.

Thanks, as ever, to Ian Bull.

GW September 2024