View allAll Photos Tagged hypervelocity
The Arkanin, facing down a swarm of barbarian Urthmen at the gates, deployed ever more powerful weapons as the war progressed. The upgraded light gas cannon proved invaluable as a multipurpose tool, as it was able to punch through both armor and particularly aircraft at great range.
While certainly effective, Arkanin forces continually faced a shortfall of arms that kept them on the backfoot when faced with the barbarian state's seemingly limitless capacity to produce arms and supply soldiers. Only after the fall of Hurink did Coalition arms and armor finally arrive in any strength.
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I'd also like to note that the Arkanin here is wearing a proper uniform, and is not running into battle half naked like the maniac in my last render.
Random remnants of space debris in the millions are circling the earth, and they are the #1 threat to spacecraft. A 1 centimeter paint fleck is capable of inflicting the same damage as a 550 pound object traveling 60 miles per hour on earth. A 4 inch /10 centimeter projectile would be comparable to 7 kilograms of TNT.
In the 1970’s Donald Kessler put forward a theory that collisions, which then create more debris, could cause a runaway chain reaction of collisions – the Kessler Syndrome. Some experts think we are already at critical mass in low-Earth orbit at about 560 to 620 miles (900 to 1,000 kilometers). The end result of collisional cascading could be to make the orbit unusable by satellites and other spacecraft.
www.nasa.gov/centers/wstf/site_tour/remote_hypervelocity_...
Is the Kessler Syndrome headed at us like a freight train?
We’re Here! -- Unlikely Celestial Objects.
At February’s Alphabet Fun the letter of the day is “R”. R is for random remnants.
Treat This challenge number 190 is underway at Kreative People. I am participating, using 2 fractal source images provided by abstractartangel77. You can see the originals in the first comment box below.
My earth is from NASA:
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-captures-epic-earth-image
Happy Sliders Sunday!
What looks like a mushroom cloud turned sideways is actually the instant an 2.8 mm-diameter aluminium bullet moving at 7 km/s pierces a spacecraft shield, captured by a high-speed camera.
“We used a gas gun at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics to test a novel material being considered for shielding spacecraft against space debris,” explains ESA researcher Benoit Bonvoisin.
“Our project has been looking into various kinds of ‘fibre metal laminates’ produced for us by GTM Structures, which are several thin metal layers bonded together with composite material.”
Growing levels of orbital debris pose increasing risks to all kinds of Earth-orbiting missions, adds engineer Andreas Tesch: “Such debris can be very damaging because of their high impact speeds of multiple kilometres per second.
“Larger pieces of debris can at least be tracked so that large spacecraft such as the International Space Station can move out of the way, but pieces smaller than 1 cm are hard to spot using radar – and smaller satellites have in general fewer opportunities to avoid collision.”
In some orbital regions small natural meteoroids can also pose a threat, in particular during intense seasonal meteoroid streams such as the Leonids.
To avoid damage from whatever source, protection is needed against small debris, typically consisting of one or more shields. Often used is the ‘Whipple shield’ – originally devised to guard against comet dust – with multiple layers separated by 10–30 cm.
The project, supported through ESA’s General Support Technology Programme, which prepares promising technology for spaceflight, looked at the efficiency of fibre metal laminates compared to current aluminium shields.
This still from the video shows the point after which the solid aluminium bullet has broken apart into a cloud of fragments and vapour, which becomes easier for the following layers to capture or deflect.
“The next step would be to perform in-orbit demonstration in a CubeSat, to assess the efficiency of these FMLs in the orbital environment,” concludes Benoit.
Credits: Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics
The M9 “Coyote” is a thoroughly modern light tank designed in the United States by General Dynamics Land Systems. Developed from the defunct HSTV-L program, the Coyote is very similar to prototypes tested for that initiative. The M9 was designed for the export market in mind, as no requirement for an air-droppable tank existed within the United States Military even deep into the 2000s. However, the global explosion of defense budgets convinced executives there that global demand for a powerful, but cheap and light vehicle capable of some anti-tank and fire support duties existed, especially amongst militaries with small budgets.
The Coyote was designed with two things in mind – light weight, and speed. The vehicle uses a fully automated turret, and is crewed by three: the driver (who is seated near-horizontally), commander and gunner. The highly sloped armor is believed to be able to take 20mm rounds from the front and side, although the exact level of protection is classified. However, the true heart of the weapon is the newly-redeveloped ARES 90mm hypervelocity burst cannon. Developed from the original 75mm demonstrators, the upgunning was deemed necessary for the vehicle to have any chance at taking down modern MBTs. The cannon is designed to fire in three round bursts at very close to the same location down-range. The theory behind this is that the first round or two will defeat armor, while the last penetrates and causes severe damage. This remains to be tested in combat, however, but the main gun makes for a highly effective tool for fire support. A unique feature is that the gun is able to pivot up nearly 90 degrees, allowing it to serve, in a pinch, as an anti-helicopter weapon. Designers were apparently not convinced of the gun’s anti-armor efficacy, so opted to add a twin TOW-2 launcher on the turret. Armament is capped off with a .50 cal Remote Weapon Station.
The Philippines was an early buyer of the Coyote, and their situation was practically tailor-made for the vehicle. Its small budget, tight terrain and need for easy air-mobility all instantly drew the military to this vehicle, and it purchased between 75 to 100 examples between 2018 and 2022, during the worst years of the USR’s shadow war and the fighting with the MKK Rebels. It has seen exemplary service in this conflict, where its rapid fire main gun has provided vital fire support deep into the jungle to troops fighting the irregulars.
The last Stormtrooper falls lifeless through the control room’s entrance.
“Congratulations” comes a voice from the inside, interrupted by the speaker’s own claps.
“I’m impressed!”
He needs to visual contact to recognize this voice, it sparks memories of times long gone.
“You shouldn’t- he replies walking past the stormtrooper’s body- Your watchdogs are a farce. Even a drunk monkey could easily take care of them”
“Ha! Always so rude with our new friends. So unfortunate. You could have been a hero in this new galactic order but you are so stubborn. They would have given you power and wealth! Oh your principles: so outdated! Democracy is overrated and…”
“And apparently in this Galaxy treachery is overused but in your case it’s actually a way of life. After all backstabbing is the only thing you good at” he replies.
“Self-righteous to the last! I think…”
“Save your breath. I’m not here for your soliloquies.”
“I know, I know. You’re here because of her death. I suppose this can end only in one way.”
“Exactly” He replies, looking directly into the traitor’s eyes.
They both reach for their weapons but before his opponent has a chance to draw his pistol the electromagnetically accelerated projectile pierces through his right shoulder, fragmenting on impact and shattering bones and tissues.
The scream of pain echoes across the control room. Then another hypervelocity round hits his adversary’s left knee with devastating effects. The regime officer falls on the floor.
He could have ended it with a single shot but he wants him to suffer. She died because of him.
This individual is a mass murder who killed thousand people. Yet, right now all he can think about it’s her. It may be selfish but she was important to me. More important than he would ever admit.
She only wanted to help those people, to protect that small colony of hard working people from the enforcers of this “new order”.
The mass murder tries to utter something. Likely one of his deranged speeches but the massive hemorrhage makes it impossible. All he manages to say is “They…will..kill you. Finish me…now.”
“Oh, not so quickly. We have to chat a little first. Are you so short-sighted to think I’d kill you without getting some answer first?” He says as he unsheathes his sword.
A cracking energy wraps around its blade. The energy field cauterizes the wounds on contact. The agent of the regime screams in agony as the blade is plunged into the left shoulder, pinning him down to the floor.
“Now let’s talk” He says…
The character is the sixth scale Captain Harlock action figure by Hot Toys and it’s an amazing collectible: truly badass :)
I hope you like this photo :)
With the fall of continental Anglotaine in 1941, the tide of public opinion in the Usonian Technate turned decisively against invading Asugisalic horde. Through lend-lease agreements, Usonian equipment began to find its way to the frontlines of the conflict in Anglotaine's various colonies and to the forces massing on the island of Albion(Having been one of the primary components of Anglotaine's dual monarchy since at least the 15th century). The cavalry arm successfuly lobbied to receive many of the Usonian tanks for its own use, with an emergency law being passed to repeal a previous ban on tanks in the cavalry(Up to this point, cavalry tanks had all been designated as armoured cars). Meanwhile, the increasingly heavy armour found in Asugisalic ranks since the late stages of the Tolmekian war spurred the development of a new 76.2mm hypervelocity anti tank gun. When mounted in the ubiquitous M23 Thomas, the combination came to be known as the "Luciole" due to the blindingly bright muzzle flash. The infantry initially rejected the vehicle due to its dissapointing HE capability and horrendous crew ergonomics, but began to spread them amongst their medium tank units to provide organic anti tank capability when they saw the dramatic successes of the cavalry's tanks against the fearsome "Tyrfing" breakthrough tanks of the Asugisalic forces
The 10th anniversary of my sim "Oxymoron" + my mainstore is just around the corner. The picture shows a newly formed area and buildings. Come in and explore!
I am always happy to hear your feedback and ideas, as the sim is still under construction.
Thanks for your support.
Have fun!
(outfit: GRAVES Hypervelocity)
“Rockwell Tradition in High Performance Aerospace Vehicles
Space Shuttle:
The world’s first reusable manned space transportation system. Vertical take-off, winged hypervelocity recovery with horizontal landing.
B-1B:
USAF strategic penetrator with supersonic capability. Features variable wing geometry and onboard systems health monitoring.
Apollo/Saturn:
Manned lunar landing program. Command and services module provided long endurance manned space habitat. Saturn booster is very large cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen integral tank. Rocketdyne J-2 and F-1 engines powered Apollo to the moon.
XB-70:
USAF Mach 3 high altitude strategic weapon system. Heaviest aircraft produced in its time. Smooth hot structure, large integral tanks, required new materials and processes. Pioneered brazed steel honeycomb, ultra-high strength steels and titanium, high temperature, high pressurized hydraulics and landing gear tires.
X-15:
First hypersonic research vehicle. Set speed (Mach 6.7) and altitude (306,900 feet) records for manned winged aircraft. Smooth hot structure pioneering Inconel materials and featuring integral tanks.
X-10/Navaho:
USAF intercontinental supersonic cruise missile utilizing vertical take-off rocket launch and ramjet propulsion for Mach 3 speed. Smooth hot structure with integral tanks.
National Aero-Space Plane:
The National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) is a joint DoD/NASA program to develop and demonstrate technology for a new generation of military, civil and commercial aerospace vehicles. This program will provide the technology development and validation by building and flying an X-30 aircraft, a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, capable of hypersonic cruise and taking off and landing on conventional runways. The NASP program will make possible a space transportation system that is one tenth the cost of existing launch vehicles and civil transportation vehicles with five times the efficiency of today’s aircraft. First flight of the X-30 is planned for 1994.”
All of the above is the Rockwell International description of the lithograph equivalent. Being from circa 1988, the X-30 /NASP figured prominently, both in description & graphic depiction, as it was the contractually sought after aerospace prize of the time.
The striking artwork is by Rockwell International artist Manuel E. Alvarez.
And check this out, this enterprising SOB has gone apeshit with a bunch of photos I’ve posted and/or linked to in my postings:
www.redbubble.com/i/photographic-print/Nasa-s-Aerospace-V...
The M9 Coyote is a privately developed light tank made by BAE Systems for any qualified buyer. Armed with a newly-upgraded ARES 90mm hypervelocity burst cannon, the Coyote is designed for rapid deployment and good mobility through challenging terrain. Its turret is fully automated, allowing a new setup of only two crewmembers, a driver (who can function as the RWS gunner), and the gunnery commander. The vehicle also sports a twin ATGM launcher for taking out heavier armor. The vehicle, being small and fast, is of course well suited for reconnaissance duties as well.
The M9 Coyote's first customer was the Philippine Army. The Philippines' military(a prospective EADA member) is currently undergoing a relatively extensive modernization program, which includes the purchasing of this light tank. Owing to the island nation's geography and terrain, MBT operations are simply not practicable. Currently 90 examples are in service with the Philippine Army, and they occasionally see deployment at EADA integration and evaluation exercises in South Korea.
While work on this began some time ago (when my goal was to make the HSTV-L), Magnus recently posted his excellent Mauler tank based on the same design. I feel obligated to mention that certain aspects of his vehicle (like the ATGMs) were directly influenced by him. Thanks, Magnus!
Custom Iron Man Mark 21 Midas, by Crayonbricks
All parts are original Lego parts. No 3rd party parts use. Decals and paint use on this minifig design
The Mark 21, also known as the Midas is one of Tony's armors that can go at supersonic speeds. It has the potential to make a sonic boom, but might fall apart if attempted. This is why Tony made the Mark XL, which can go at hypervelocity speeds without falling apart.
An aluminium plate, ripped inwards by a single sand grain-sized fleck of aluminium oxide shot at it during hypervelocity testing.
Man-made space debris and natural meteoroids moving at high speed can damage satellites and constitute a serious hazard to spaceflight, especially human spacecraft.
Typical impact speeds encountered by satellites are 10 km/s for space debris and 20 km/s for meteoroids – some 10–20 times faster than a bullet from a gun.
Measuring approximately 15x15 cm across, the plate displayed outside the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The main hole, seen here, measures 28x12 mm across, with a few smaller adjacent holes.
ESA engineers typically use numerical simulations to study the potential effects of hypervelocity impacts on missions.
In addition, ground-based hypervelocity tests are performed at several test sites in Europe. Light gas guns are available at the Ernst-Mach Institut (Germany), CISAS (Italy), Centre d’Etudes de Gramat (France), The Open University and University of Kent (UK).
Electrostatic accelerators, also used for hypervelocity testing, are used at the Max-Planck Institut für Kernphysik (Germany), The Open University and the TU Munich.
Credit: ESA–G. Porter
The photo shows the "energy flash" when a projectile launched at speeds up to 17,000 mph impacts a solid surface at the Hypervelocity Ballistic Range at NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. This test is used to simulate what happens when a piece of orbital debris hits a spacecraft in orbit.
Credit: NASA
Image Number: A-26921-B
Date: August 17, 1960
“NUCLEUS OF COMET HALLEY
HALLEY MULTICOLOUR CAMERA COMPOSITE OF 60 IMAGES”
Also, at/from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) website, which btw has a whole lot more good stuff:
“A composite image of the nucleus of comet P/Halley
This image is composed of 68 images of varying resolution. The data at the brightest point on the nucleus is at the highest resolution (50 m). The Sun comes from 30 deg above the horizontal to the left and is 17 deg behind the image plane (observation phase angle of 107 deg). The night side of the nucleus can be seen silhouetted against a background of bright dust in the far-field. Jets can be seen originating from two regions on the nucleus. Structure can be seen within the jets. A bright area is seen within the night side of the nucleus. We believe this to be a hill or mountain approximately 500 m high. Other surface details can be seen in the illuminated region.”
www2.mps.mpg.de/en/projekte/giotto/hmc/index_print.html
Additionally:
“In 1978, ESA was invited by NASA to plan a joint mission consisting of a comet Halley fly-by in November 1985 and a rendezvous with comet Tempel 2 in 1988. The mission comprised an American main spacecraft which would carry a European probe. The main spacecraft, with its array of sophisticated cameras and experiments, would complete a fly-by of comet Halley at a safe distance. Shortly before fly-by, the probe would be released towards the nucleus to make detailed in-situ observations in the innermost coma. In January 1980, however, it became clear that financial support for the Halley Fly-by/Tempel 2 Rendezvous mission could not be secured in the USA. By that time the interest of European scientists had built up such momentum that ESA considered the possibility of a purely European mission. The support for a fly-by mission was strong in Europe and went far beyond the small section of scientists specialized in cometary research. A fly-by of comet Halley was suggested to ESA by the scientific community in February 1980. Rather than having the American spacecraft deliver the probe to the comet as in the earlier concept, the Europeans proposed that the capabilities of the small probe be increased by building an independent, self-sufficient spacecraft to be launched using the European Ariane rocket. The limited time available for development and the small financial resources made it advisable to use a spin-stabilized spacecraft derived from the European Earth orbiting spacecraft Geos. This proposal was studied by ESA in the first half of 1980.
The European mission to comet Halley was named Giotto after the Italian painter Giotto di Bondone who depicted comet Halley as the `Star of Bethlehem' in one of his frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua in 1304. The Giotto mission was finally approved as ESA's first interplanetary mission on 7 July 1980. An Announcement of Opportunity was issued shortly thereafter requesting proposals for scientific payload instrumentation. NASA was still interested at this stage but could not decide whether to participate or not, partly because the American scientific community did not whole-heartedly support a cometary fly-by mission. Some scientists believed that the scientific return would not be worth the effort. Finally, NASA declined to participate and refused to provide direct financial support for any American hardware involvement. By the end of January 1981, 11 European experiments were selected to perform the diagnostic measurements during a close fly-by of comet Halley in March 1986.
The mission was a fast flyby in March 1986 after the comet's perihelion, when it is most active. The scientific payload consists of 10 experiments with a total mass of about 60 KG: a camera for imaging the comet nucleus, three mass spectrometers for analysis of the elemental and isotopic composition of the cometary gas and dust environment, various dust impact detectors, a photopolarimeter for measurements of the coma brightness, and a set of plasma instruments for studies of the solar wind/comet interaction. In view of the high flyby velocity of 68.4 km/sec, the experiment active time is only 4 h and all data are transmitted back to Earth in real time at a rate of 40 kbits/s. The Giotto spacecraft is spin-stabilized with a despun, high-gain parabolic antenna inclined at 44.3 degrees to point at the Earth during the encounter. A specially designed dual-sheet bumper shield protects the forward end of the spacecraft from being destroyed by hypervelocity dust impacts. The spacecraft passed the nucleus at a distance of 596+/-2 km on the sunward side. The time of closest approach occurred at 00:03:01.84 UT on March 14 (spacecraft event time). However, at 7.6 s before closest approach, Giotto was hit by a large dust particle, whose impact caused the spacecraft angular momentum vector to shift by 1 degree. The effect of the impact was that the next 32 minutes of scientific data were received only intermittently. It is concluded that the spacecraft traversed a region of high dust concentration (dust jet). A few hours after closest approach, a number of the instruments were determined to be inoperable, probably from the passage through the dust jet. About half of the experiments worked flawlessly during the encounter, while the other half suffered damage due to dust impacts. The spacecraft also suffered some damage, but it was possible to redirect it to the Earth before it was put into hibernation.
Spacecraft ID : GIO
Target name : Halley
Spacecraft Operations Type : FLYBY
MISSION PHASES
Launch:
The Giotto spacecraft was launched on July 2, 1985 onboard an Ariane-1 rocket from Kourou, French Guyana.
Mission phase start time: 1985-07-02
Mission phase stop time: 1985-07-02
Cruise:
The Giotto spacecraft was initially injected into a Geostationary Transfer Orbit. After three revolutions in orbit, the onboard motor was fired near perigee to inject Giotto into a heliocentric orbit. The high gain antenna was despun three days later. The HMC was switched on in Format 3 on August 10, 1985 to monitog of its barrel, followed by the Magnetometer Experiment and Energetic Particles Experiment switch-on on August 22, 1985. After a cruise phase of 8 months, Giotto encountered Comet Halley on Mar 14, 1986. Along its trajectory, the Magnetometer and Energetic Particle experiments remained on. The other instruments followed a on/pyro firing test sequence from Sep through Oct 1985. The science instruments will take data at various times starting on March 9, but only the magnetometer and energetic particle experiments will be able to make use of this continuous coverage. Continuous data coverage was provided in a high-data-rate mode about 50 hours before and 26.5 hours after encounter, at which point the last experiment was switched-off.
Mission phase start time: 1985-07-02
Mission phase stop time: 1986-03-12
Encounter:
There were specific periods of science data availability after the last orbit correction maneuver that occurred on March 12 at 05:00. The time of closest approach on March 14 is 00:03:01.84 UT, given in SCET or spacecraft event time. (This time can be related to GSRT or ground station received time by the equation GSRT = SCET + 8 min 0.1 s.) Some instruments, such as EPA, MAG, and GRE, ran continuously during the encounter which lasted approximately 4 hours. Other instruments were switched-on for some intervals between March 12 and March 13, but by 20:18 on that day all instruments were functioning. Unfortunately, 7.6 s before closest approach, Giotto was hit by a large dust particle in a dust jet. Only intermittent data was received for the next 32 minutes of the encounter and damage to a number of instruments was substantial.
Mission phase start time: 1986-03-12
Mission phase stop time: 1986-03-15
MISSION OBJECTIVES SUMMARY
Mission Objectives Overview:
The Giotto scientific objectives, as formulated by the Giotto Science Study Group are as follows:
1. to provide the elemental and isotopic composition of volatile components in the cometary coma, in particular to identify the parent molecules
2. to characterize the physical processes and chemical reactions that occur in the cometary atmosphere and ionosphere
3. to determine the elemental and isotopic composition of the cometary dust particles
4. to measure the total gas production rate and the dust flux and size/mass distribution and to derive the dust-to-gas ratio
5. to investigate the macroscopic system of plasma flows resulting from the interaction between the cometary and solar-wind plasma
6. to provide numerous images of the comet nucleus with a resolution down to 50 m. From these the nucleus size and rotation may be deduced and its mass may be estimated.
The damage to the spacecraft and the instrument payload was not systematically investigated in the days after encounter by additional operations and thorough analysis of spacecraft and experiment housekeeping data. However, to preserve the possibility of a later mission extension, Giotto's orbit was slightly modified to bring it back to Earth in July 1990 (a `free-return trajectory') before Giotto was put into a safe hibernation configuration on 2 April 1986. In 1987, the thorough analysis of spacecraft and experiment data was finally carried out (Curdt and Keller, 1987) when it became clear that the ESA advisory bodies might be in favor of a mission extension. By using an Earth swing-by maneuver in July 1990, Giotto could be redirected to encounter another comet. Of the available targets comet Grigg-Skjellerup appeared the best choice. The Giotto spacecraft was re-activated in February 1990, after almost five years in hibernation when it was once again within 1 AU of the Earth. The spacecraft and payload were fully checked out in May 1990.
A preliminary damage report based on encounter data indicated that the baffle of HMC had been lost. Except for this deficiency, the camera still seemed operational. This assessment was fully confirmed during the switch-on in May 1990. All subsystems including detectors and mechanisms worked well. HMC, however, could not detect any object in the sky, not even the Sun. It is now believed that the aperture of HMC is covered (possibly by remains of the baffle) and no light can enter the focal plane. The check-out showed that about half of the payload was still functional and the spacecraft was still operational. Based on these findings, the Giotto Extended Mission (GEM) to comet Grigg-Skjellerup was approved.
The Giotto Mission and specifically, the Halley Multicolor Camera project achieved its goals. The existence of the cometary nucleus was verified. Its shape was determined and surface features at a resolution of 50 m per pixel were identified. Dust jets originating from restricted areas were found. Due to the reset at 9.21 seconds before closest approach only limited information could be achieved on the nucleus volume and its rotation. On the other hand, additional information on the dust size distribution and the gas/dust interaction could be derived from the images."
Above at/from:
pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/holdings/gio-c-hmc-3-rdr-halley-v1.0...
Credit: Planetary Data System (PDS) website
A once in a lifetime opportunity & NASA says "Sure...PSYCHE…nah, we'll pass." WTF?!
My guess is that the Shuttle Program had sucked/was sucking/was going to suck all of the oxygen - and money - out of the room.
An exit hole through Kevlar–Nextel fabric after hypervelocity testing of the multilayer shielding for ESA’s ATV space freighter, simulating an impact by space debris. The good news is that testing confirms the spacecraft's pressure shell would survive such a collision intact.
Testing was carried out for
ESA’s Space Environment and Effects section at the Fraunhofer Ernst Mach Institut for High-Speed Dynamics in Brühl, Germamy, using a high-performance light-gas gun.
A 7.5 mm-diameter aluminium bullet was shot at 7 km/s towards the same ‘stuffed Whipple shield’ design used to protect the ATV and the other International Space Station manned modules.
This represents the upper end of the size of debris the shield is designed to cope with. Multiple layers give greater protection than a single thick aluminium layer.
The debris begins by piercing a blanket of multilayer insulation, followed by a 1 mm-thick aluminium ‘bumper shield’.
This impact makes the solid object break apart into a cloud of fragment and vapour, which becomes easier for the following layers to capture or deflect. Next comes the layer of stuffing seen in this main photo, a weave of lightweight Kevlar and Nextel fabric, which further slows the incoming debris.
The stuffing fabric and a surrounding sheet has been thoroughly shredded by the impact, but the overall mass and energy of the debris has been sufficiently dissipated that it has merely harmlessly scorched the innermost 3-mm-thick aluminium wall.
In orbit, this entire shield measures just 128 mm across.
The stronger-than-steel Kevlar fabric was invented by Stephanie Kwolek of the DuPont company, who died this month.
On Earth, her invention’s ‘killer app’ proved to be bulletproof vests; its use on the Space Station helps to ensure that module hulls could be designed several centimetres thinner than would otherwise be the case.
ESA’s next and final ATV, Georges Lemaître, launches to the ISS later this summer.
Credit: ESA-Stijn Laagland
Lonar Lake, which was created by a meteor hitting the Earth during the Pleistocene epoch, is a saltwater lake at Lonar in Buldana district, Maharashtra, India. The impact crater thereby formed is the only hypervelocity meteoritic impact crater on basalt rock. A lake that evolved in the resulting basaltic rock formation, is both saline and alkaline in nature. Geologists, ecologists, archaeologists, naturalists and astronomers have reported several studies on the various aspects of this crater lake ecosystem. Lonar Lake has a mean diameter of 1.2 kilometres (3,900 ft) and is about 137 metres (449 ft) below the crater rim. The meteor crater rim is about 1.8 kilometres (5,900 ft) in diameter. The circular depression bears a saline water lake in its central portion. The crater's age is estimated to be 52,000 ± 6,000 years (Pleistocene). It is the second largest impact crater in basaltic rock and is partially filled by a salt water lake. (Source Wiki)
Clicked at Lonar, Maharastra.
(BEST VIEWED LARGE AND CRUNCHY !!)
...It was billionaire industrialist Tony Stark's OTHER addiction that inspired the colour scheme for his most famous Iron Man specialty armour...
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In the Marvel Comic limited series Iron Man: Hypervelocity #5 of 6 it's suggested that Tony Stark got his colour scheme for his armour from his elementary school colours.
Fair enough! They'd know. But a while back I saw a terrific picture that fellow Iron man fan ElDave posted in his photostream:
www.flickr.com/photos/eldave/471883835/in/set-72157600123...
(Ta ElDave, this one's for you and your Invincible Iron Legion!)
Anyway, that got me wondering where Tony REALLY got his signature colours from.....
Well, okay, ya got me. It's supposed to be red & gold, but, strewth, what's a variant foil cover between fans, y'know? That's the eternal decision that faces us Shellheads, yellow or gold?
Well, until they make metallic M & Ms (or I spraypaint some gold!) for the sake of the gag it's yellow, mm'kay?
I suppose, to be patriotic, I should have used Smarties, the chocolate treat that pre-date M & Ms, that have been popular in Australia since the 1930s, and upon which the U.S candy is modelled. Somehow, Iron Smarty doesn't quite have the same ring to it.... ;)
Anyway, my sculpt of an Iron Zombie action figure proved a little more complex than I initially thought, the Super Sculpey not being tough enough to articulate without breakages I've had to make moulds of my sculpture and am casting it up in strong thermosetting plastic. So, while I'm pottering away with that I wanted to build something that would take a little less time and this is what came to mind.
Bemusingly, I know precisely how much time it took to sculpt Iron M & M since I whipped him up whilst watching an episode of the new British Robin Hood series, a fantasy time travel show called Life on Mars and a cracking good documentary on Atheism by the courageously rational Richard Dawkins. So, around two and a half to three hours, all up. Since I didn't need to articulate this wee bloke, the Sculpey was perfectly up to the task. Yes, I know Tony doesn't have his moustache and eyebrows on the outside of his face plate! It's a caricature, right?
Painting took a bit longer, since I used the Humbrol range of model kit enamels, which I thought would adequately replicate the toy/chocolate candy gloss that I wanted.
Yes, the back is detailed, and I even got carried away with the boot jets, but you'll see that in another photo soon.
The biggest problem with the photoshoot (which I wanted bright and comically lit) was making sure that nobody ate the bloody M & Ms (me included!). As it was, I ended up with one less red one than I needed to spell out TONY STARK, but then, that's what Photoshop is for, eh? Of course, I can stop eating these things any time.
Any. Time. Soon. Justonemore. 'N one after that for the road.....right?
Now, I wonder what a War M & M Machine would look like done like this? Hmm!
In the 21st century, before anything is built, before a spade breaks the earth, a whole series of legal processes must take place to ensure that no one's point of view is not heard.
Our Victorian forebears had no such issues of course, if they saw that something needed to built, then whatever was in its way, it would be torn down so progress could be made.
Not always the best way to do things, but this attitude helped the track millage in Britain increase year on year in the 19th century. And then, with the dawning of the 20th century, no more main lines were built in Britain, until the CTRL.
But back to the matter in hand. Imagine, someone had an idea of defacing that great symbol of Britain, the White Cliffs of Dover, by building a ten metre wide shelf in them and running a railway up them, a railway which would only be open for a decade at most. Clearly there would be public uproar. Will it ever be built?
Well, it was built, the cliffs were scarred, the railway built, used and ripped up. The shelf, The Cliff Road, is still there, leading from under Jubilee Way up round the top of Langdon Hole. It is possible to look at Google Earth and see the trackbed crossing Reach Road, Deal Road before running alongside the Deal to Dover line, the line from the cliffs losing height until at Martin Mill, they had their junction.
Then, during WWII, rail mounted guns were needed to fire across the channel, the track was relaid, and new lines laid in arcs of fire, so the guns could recoil and make aiming easier.
After the way, the track was taken up again, bridges dismantled and mostly forgotten.
Many thanks, then, to my friend Paul Wells for posting shots of these rails, recently uncovered after clearance of mud on an old military road, the only trace, other than The Cliff Road, that remains of the railway.
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At the cliff end of Athol Terrace, near Eastern Docks, Dover, a steep footpath leads up the cliff and then along Langdon Cliffs towards St Margaret’s. From the footpath, one can watch the daily activities of Dover’s Eastern Docks and Channel shipping beyond. On clear day, the coast France with the Strait of Dover, like a wide river, in between is quite a site. As one traverses the path, it becomes apparent that it was once a railway track.
The story begins in 1892 when Dover Harbour Board (DHB) accepted the tender of John Jackson (1851-1919) for the building of the Eastern Arm of the new Commercial Harbour - the Prince of Wales Pier. Four years later, in August 1896, the Undercliff Reclamation Act received Royal Assent. The Act was for laying out land on the South Foreland, near St Margaret’s, where a new ‘Dover’ was to be built.
The Parliamentary Bill had been sponsored by Sir William Crundall (1847-1934), thirteen times Mayor of Dover from 1886 to 1910. Crundall owned a construction company that had been founded by his late father, also called William. Both father and son were the prime movers in the development of Dover’s town planning:
- On the west side of the Dour cottages for the working class – Clarendon estate
- On the east side homes for the lower middle class i.e. Barton Road neighbourhood
- Below the Castle and nearer the sea, villas for the upper middle class i.e. the Castle Avenue estate.
The next part of their dream for Dover was to be a private estate on the South Foreland for the well-to-do upper classes.
Crundall had been appointed to DHB in 1886 and twenty years later, in 1906, he was elected Chairman of the Board. He was to hold the office until his death in 1934. Two other businessmen were involved in the proposed South Foreland scheme, Sir John Jackson, who had won the contract for building the Prince of Wales Pier. The third person involved in the South Foreland enterprise was the eminent construction engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray. His company had tendered to build the proposed Admiralty Harbour, which would enclose the whole of Dover bay.
The three men decided that access to the South Foreland site was to be by a road starting from the shore by Castle Jetty, at the east end of Dover’s seafront. It would then run along the base of the cliffs before gently rising to South Foreland at St Margaret’s. To reduce anticipated opposition while the Undercliff Reclamation Bill was going through Parliament, the main purpose given was the prevention of sea erosion at the base of the cliffs. This was substantiated by Sir John Jackson calling an expert witness who proclaimed the necessity. Dover Corporation echoed this and showed that over the previous 25 years the encroachment of the sea had given rise to numerous cliff falls.
It was agreed that in time an Undercliff marine road would be built on the inside of a seawall between Dover and St Margaret’s Bay but not in the foreseeable future. In the immediate future a road if built, they implied, would go over the cliffs. Thus the opposition centred their argument on this saying that if the over-cliff road were to go ahead, it would effectively put public land into private hands. This was dealt with by amendment to the Bill by giving the over-cliff road a lower priority than the Undercliff marine road … either way, the three men got exactly what they wanted!
Before the Bill had received parliamentary approval, excavations began. Initially, the men stated that 500 convicts from the then Langdon prison would be part of the workforce. However, Herbert Asquith, the Home Secretary, refused to comply! For the residents of Athol Terrace, permission for the compulsorily purchase of their front gardens was given and the road we see today was laid at their doorsteps.
The Admiralty Harbour, we see today, was given the go ahead by the government on 5 April 1898 when the contract was signed. Viscount Cowdray’s company (Pearsons) were the main contractors, Sir John Jackson was a subcontractor and Dover Harbour Board, under Sir William Crundall, was actively involved.
To build the Piers and the Breakwater of the new Admiralty Harbour, Pearsons used locally made concrete blocks and faced them with granite. The concrete blocks were made at two blockyards, one on Shakespeare beach in the west and the second on reclaimed land to the east of Castle Jetty, where the Undercliff marine road was proposed to start. To reclaim land the cliff face was blasted and the surplus chalk was removed by steam-navvies – locomotive driven excavators made by Ruston, Proctor & Co, Sheaf Ironworks, Lincoln. Soon a level platform, some 24½ acres (9.915 hectares), was created at the base of the eastern cliffs where the massive blocks were made and stored.
The blocks were made out of sand and shingle brought by ship from Stonar, near Sandwich and unloaded into trucks at the Castle Jetty. From there the trucks were manually pushed along a narrow-gauge track to the blockyard. However, the sea journey was subject to the vagaries of the weather and so it was decided to run a Standard gauge Light Railway line (engines could not go more than 25 miles an hour) from Martin Mill, the nearest station on the South East and Chatham Railway line between Dover and Deal.
The three and a half mile track was pegged out by June 1898. It ran from the Dover side of Martin Mill main line station parallel to the Dover – Deal line for about a mile. Crossing two roads on bridges made of brick abutments with supporting iron girders. Just before the main line Guston Tunnel the Pearson line veered south towards the coast and then along an embankment passing under the Dover-Deal road (A258) near the Swingate Inn. Past Bere Farm, West Cliffe, the line continued south-east crossing the Dover -St Margaret’s Upper Road by a gate. It then turned south-west, following the cliff contours, skirting Langdon Bay. Running west, it followed the edge of Langdon Cliff for about half a mile where metal frames were erected on the cliff edge to stop chalk falling on the works below.
Much of the land that the Pearson railway, as it was called, crossed, was owned by the Cliff Land Company the principal owner of which was Frederick George North, 8th Earl of Guilford (1876–1949) of Waldershare Park. Back in 1844, with the coming of the South Eastern Railway to Dover, the Guilford family had made an application to build 1,500 houses on land to the north of the Castle with an approach road from Castle Jetty. The family still had this dream and the 8th Earl made a deal with Pearsons to charge £25 per year ground rent with the option to buy the standard gauge line, once the lease had expired, for £3,000. It was planned that the Cliff Land Company would use the railway for a passenger service to the development. From Langdon Hole to East Cliff the land was owned by the War Office. They stipulated that the track was to be completed by December 1899. Further, that the Pearson railway was only to be used for carrying materials and the site had to be restored to its original condition.
At the end of the line was a chute down which the materials were fed to the block yard. This quickly proved a problem and was replaced by a funicular, down the cliff face, with side tipping skips to ease unloading. At the bottom, the skips were pushed by hand along a narrow-gauge track built on trestles to the blockyard and emptied into one of six lines of mixers where some 250 blocks were made at once. These were moved by blockyard goliaths – cranes with a span of 100-feet that could lift 50-tons.
The excavations were not without problems. In October 1898, fuses and explosives were taken and deliberately fired at the rear of the sea front East Cliff houses. In September 1899, Albert Knowler was killed during blasting and three months later, a fire in the East Cliff office burnt a man to death. Then, on 19 January 1900, as men were preparing to blast some more of the cliff face there was a massive explosion. Five men, George Jeffries, aged 24, – who later died – James Murton, Ernest Dutton, William Davies and Algenon Gibbs were all injured. In May 1900, labourer Bill Chadwick age-32, was killed by a lump of chalk during blasting at East Cliff.
Neither was the new railway line without controversy, much to the annoyance of the local tourist industry it caused the North Fall Tunnel, a pathway created by the Dover Chamber of Commerce in 1870 to provide a short cut from the beach to the Castle, to be destroyed. In its place, a new path with a steep gradient was excavated up to Broadlees, some distance east of the Castle. This path was expected to be extended in the direction of St Margaret’s Bay and eventually to become the over-cliff road, one of the two options that was envisaged to connected Dover with New Dover – the superlative estate that Crundall, Jackson and Cowdray planned to build at the South Foreland.
The actual building of the Eastern Arm was started in January 1901 and Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson applied for a Light Railway Order to extend the Pearson railway to the South Foreland. A Light Railway order would allow the trains to run on a standard track but at no more than 25 miles an hour, however, this the degree of regulation was less than that applied to main line services and therefore cheaper to set up, run and maintain. The proposal said that the line would run from Athol Terrace, up a 1-in-28 gradient along a 60-foot wide ‘road’ cut into the face of the cliff to Langdon Battery. It would then cross the fields to St Margaret’s to the proposed site of New Dover, before continuing to Martin Mill and joining the main line.
The application stated that it would be a tram/railway service powered by electricity - the local electricity company was then in private ownership and Crundall was the Chairman. There was also the stated intention of extending the line from the Eastern Dockyard, as it became to be called, along Dover’s seafront, Union Street, Strond Street and then to the Harbour station, on the western side of what became the Western Docks. There the proposed line would join the main South East and Chatham Railway line. Another line would go from the existing Deal line at Buckland and then via River to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley.
In April 1902 a public inquiry, headed by the Earl of Jersey, was held into the application. It was agreed that the Company could lay down lines for a light railway in the Borough of Dover, but they could not exercise that power for two years. This was to give time to Dover Corporation, if desirable, to obtain the authority to extend their tramways. Further, on the proposed light railway to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley, this was to terminate at River church and go no further. The application explicitly stated that the tram/railway would be a passenger service, which contravened the agreement with the Earl of Guilford. He immediately sought legal advice and eventually laid out his landholdings on the cliff top as a seaside residential resort.
Crundall, against considerable opposition, in 1907, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
At the western end of the harbour, the Admiralty Pier extension was completed in 1908 and South Eastern Railway Company, with representatives on the Dover Harbour Board, proposed to erect a grand new terminal station at the landward end. Early the following year, Crundall, as Chairman of DHB, invited tenders to widen Admiralty Pier for the possibility of a new railway station. The Lords of the Admiralty visited and discussed the proposals and on 9 December, Pearsons were given the contract.
The Admiralty Harbour was officially opened on the 15 October 1909 by the Prince of Wales, later George V (1910-1936) who unveiled a stone commemorating the event on the Eastern Arm. Two months before, on 9 August, the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company (Light Railway Company) was formed. Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson owned 25 shares each and four others owned one share each. One of these shareholders was Richard Tilden-Smith who later became the main shareholder of Tilmanstone Colliery.
Later that month planning permission was given by Dover Corporation for the utilisation of the Light Railway Company line as a public tramway. The residents of East Cliff objected but their concerns were dismissed by the Corporation and John Bavington Jones, of the Dover Express.
Work started on 21 July 1910 to widen the shore end of the Admiralty Pier for the new railway station comprising of over 11 acres. Chalk for in-filling was taken from East Cliff excavated by the steam-navvy machines. The excavations also created a new road. However, because of the cliffs are so steep when the ‘road’ reached the top it had to be cut in a series of zigzags. This problem was expected to be dealt with later, when the rest of the road was nearing completion.
At the base of East Cliff, railway lines were used to transport the chalk to Castle Jetty where it was loaded onto barges and taken across to Admiralty Pier. In 1910, while the excavations were going on, Channel Collieries Trust was set up to purchase land near South Foreland. Their remit stated that they would build a residential estate, approached by a Cliff Road and the St Margaret’s Light Railway from Dover. The Trust syndicate was composed of … Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson! The road from the excavations was started on 21 July 1910.
The last coping stone on the Admiralty Pier extension was laid by Crundall on 2 April 1913. A month later work started on building the Marine Station, the foundations having been filled in by 1 million cubic yards of chalk from the eastern cliffs.
Two months before, in February 1913, DHB chaired by Crundall, filed a Parliamentary Bill to make changes to the Tidal Basin at the Western Docks. As a supplementary, the Channel Collieries Trust sort consent to replace the western half of the seafront and beach with a 5.75 acre dock and terminus for a Light Railway Company. This went down badly in Dover and a petition was raised followed by a poll that took place on 20 May 1913. Of those eligible to vote, 2,265 voted against the Bill’s Supplement and 1,508 for it. The Supplement was withdrawn.
On 13 April, a closed meeting of the Light Railway Company was held when it was announced that Cowdray and Crundall had sold their shares, by transfer, to the Channel Collieries Trust. The four holders of the single shares in Light Railway Company were not invited to the meeting – the first they heard about it was when they read the national newspapers. A bitter legal battle ensued with Richard Tilden-Smith unsuccessfully trying to seek redress. In the event, Sir John Jackson and two nominees owned the controlling shares in the Light Railway Company.
At the time, the East Kent coalmining industry was taking off. Arthur Burr, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder of several companies with interests in the Kent coalfield, was the leading light. One of these companies was Kent Coal Concessions. Arthur Burr had formed it in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. The intention was lease the coalfields for a share of the royalties. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries.
East Kent Colliery Company also was part of Burr’s portfolio and its holdings included, Shakespeare and Snowdown Collieries. Shakespeare Colliery was sunk in 1896, but had not proved viable and was finally abandoned in December 1915. However, Snowdown, north of Dover, saw the first commercial East Kent coal raised on 19 November 1912. About that time, Burr announced the intention of floating a new company, as a subsidiary of Kent Coal Concessions, to ‘exploit undeveloped areas of East Kent.’
A previous similar floatation had not been a commercial success and the Company Board were not happy. The situation came to a head at a meeting on 31 July 1913 when Burr, along with his son, Dr Malcolm Burr, were ‘retired’ from the Board. The remaining directors consolidated Kent Coal Concessions with allied companies including Kent Collieries Ltd that had extensive mineral rights and had been undertaking mineral exploration. Towards the end of 1913 the giant steel firm, Dorman Long, in which Cowdray was involved, reported that they held 30,000 shares in the Channel Collieries Trust Company, whose holdings included the East Kent Colliery Company, part of the Burr portfolio. Borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. Dorman Long also had interests in Kent Collieries Ltd.
Just prior to World War I (1914-1918), in May 1914, Burr attempted to raise £77,000 in debentures and £800,000 in income bonds for his East Kent Colliery Company. However, little interest was shown and the holdings were handed over to Kent Coal Concessions, by the Official Receiver, with the remit to consolidate. Following consolidation the company held mineral rights under some 20,000 acres of East Kent. In December 1917, Burr was declared bankrupt with debts amounting to £53,176 but he died in September 1919 age 70.
At Dorman Long & Co.’s AGM held in August 1917, it was reported that their investments, through the Channel Collieries Trust Ltd, were a satisfactory £877,304, even though the War had stopped any further excavations. Albeit, with the consent of the Treasury, a fusion of the different East Kent coal interests was agreed with the two chief companies, Kent Collieries Ltd and the Channel Collieries Trust put into voluntary liquidation. Out of this, the Channel Steel Company was formed with a capital of £750,000. It was reported to the assembled shareholders that it was the existence of a large deposit of ironstone in East Kent that had provided the name of the new company.
Sir William Crundall – Chairman of Dover Harbour Board;
Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray – whose company, Pearsons, had successfully tendered to build the Admiralty Harbour,
Sir John Jackson who had been involved in the building the Admiralty Harbour. The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The company had applied, in 1914, for the renewal of their powers to carry coal through the streets of Dover with a view to extending the line from the Western docks to the Eastern Dockyard. The Town Council opposed this, but due to outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), the case was deferred. In order to carry explosives to war-ships berthed in the Camber, at the eastern Dockyard, the War Office decided to build a Sea Front Railway, using the powers that were likely to have been awarded to the Light Railway Company.
Pearson’s successfully tendered and work on what was to become the Sea Front Railway was eventually started in 1918. Single-track and running the length of the promenade from the Prince of Wales Pier to the Eastern Dockyard, the lines that had been used for the Pearson Line and belonging to the Light Railway Company, were taken up and used. It had passing loops and catch points so that trains could run in both directions but soon after the line was laid an accident occurred so a low fence was erected on each side.
Following the death of Sir John Jackson, in December 1919, the Light Railway Company was taken over by the Channel Steel Company. They applied, in 1920, to run a line from the Sea Front Railway at New Bridge, along Camden Crescent, then Liverpool Street (now the rear of the Gateway flats), and following the base of the cliffs to Eastern Dockyard. It was expected that the cliff side residences of East Cliff and Athol Terrace would be demolished.
At the Eastern Dockyard it was envisaged that a railway station would be built and the previously cut road would become a railway track that through a newly constructed tunnel, would join the track of the old Pearsons line. This would then be extended Sea Street, St Margaret’s where another station would be built. The line would then cross the countryside to join the Dover-Deal railway line at Martin Mill.
The new proposal was given outline approval by Dover Corporation with the preference for the construction to be a road not a railway track. This was due to the continuing rise in unemployment in the town – a situation that was prevalent throughout the country at the time – more men could be employed to build a road then a railway. If, however, the company were mindful to create a railway then, the Corporation said, their preference was for the facility to be a tramway, similar to that, which already existed in Dover at the time. Finally, whatever the company decided, colliery trucks could only be used on land purchased by the company and the track could not go through the town.
The Company chose the road option following the route given in the outline proposal. It was to be 50feet (16 metres) wide with a 15-feet (5 metres) wide pavement on each side. The estimated cost was £43,000 and it was expected to provide employment for up to 300 men. The council suggested that Pearsons paid one third, the Corporation a third and it would be expected that the government’s Unemployment Grants Committee would pay the remainder.
In the autumn of 1922, Pearsons joined forces with steel makers Dorman Long, to form Pearson & Dorman Long Company and take over most of the rights from the Kent Coal Concessions. The latter company had been set up by Arthur Burr, the East Kent mining entrepreneur, in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries. Burr’s large portfolio of mining associated companies in East Kent were consolidated in 1913 under the name of Kent Coal Concessions. The giant steel makers, Dorman Long held 30,000 shares in the consolidated company as borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. In 1917, a partial consolidation had created the Channel Steel Company and included Snowdown Colliery. Although Kent Coal Concessions did retain some mineral rights, due to the economic depression no one was interested in leasing them and in 1925, the company folded.
Having amalgamated the newly styled Pearson Dorman Long company immediately started the preliminary work on what resulted in Betteshanger Colliery. However, as they did not own the surface land they were unable to sink the pit. Albeit, through the subsidiary, Channel Steel Company, they proposed building a steel works between Dover and St Margaret’s adjacent to the proposed new road and Dover Corporation gave their approval.
The council applied to the Unemployment Grants Committee stating that the cost for the new road was £56,000. The Committee asked for the plans to be modified and suggested that the Ministry of Transport and Kent County Council (KCC) should contribute towards the costs. While these applications were being made the road was put on hold. During the winter of 1923-24, the revised estimate had increased to £129,000 but government financing was not forthcoming.
On 29 September 1923, the Admiralty formerly handed the port over to the Dover Harbour Board (DHB), still headed by Sir William Crundall. This included the Sea Front Railway line but the Eastern Dockyard was retained by the Admiralty and let on lease to Stanlee Ship-breaking Company. The Camber was retained for Admiralty purposes.
During spring and summer of 1924, Dover’s Mayor, Richard Barwick, and the Town Clerk, Reginald Knocker, visited various government departments laying before them the urgent need for unemployment relief. The Ministry of Transport relented and sanctioned the borrowing of £45,000. In the autumn of 1924 sites near Kingsdown were put on the market through Protheroe and Morris of Cheapside, London. Channel Collieries Trust held the mineral rights under the property and the sites were bought by Pearson Dorman Long – at last, they could sink Betteshanger Colliery.
Unemployment continued to rise and in 1925 DHB applied to Parliament to close Dover harbour’s Western entrance. They wanted to run a railway line along the Southern Breakwater to load Kent coal onto ships for export from there. However, the disparity in exchange rates between the UK and the Continent meant that the country was importing coal and the application came under a lot of criticism.
On the subject of Exchange Rate parity and the negative effect it was having on British industry, Sir Arthur Dorman made a powerful and well reported speech (Economist 19.12.1925). He begged the government for equal parity in the exchange rates but the response was: ‘a strong £ was the sign of a strong country.‘ Pearson Dorman Long wrote to the council saying that they could no longer afford to contribute to the cost of the road.
Cheap imports of coal continued to affect the domestic industry but in February 1926, the government did give a grant of £2m to the Kent coalfields. However, at midnight on 3 May saw the beginning of the General Strike. In October, that year, the council finally heard from the Unemployment Grants Committee through a letter sent to the town’s Member of Parliament (1922 -1945), Major the Hon. John Jacob Astor. The Committee had declined to provide a grant for the East Cliff Road, the reason given was that ‘unemployment in Dover was not sufficiently exceptional to warrant relief.’ It was generally felt that the refusal was retaliatory because East Kent miners had joined the national strike.
Richard Tilden Smith, who had been involved in a bitter legal action against the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company in 1913, bought Tilmanstone Colliery from the Official Receiver in November 1926. At the same time an application was made by Tilmanstone (Kent) Collieries Ltd for the right to carry an aerial ropeway for a distance of 6½ miles (this was stated in the original application) from their colliery. This was to include a tunnel being cut through the cliffs to the Eastern Dockyard. The proposed course extended over land owned by 18 different personages one of which was Southern Railway. Although permission was granted, Southern Railway, and the Pearson, Dorman Long’s Channel Steel Company appealed but this was overturned and works started.
In 1927 Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, died. Under the 1896 terms of agreement between the War Department and Pearsons, the line from East Cliff to Langdon Hole had to be restored to its original condition. In May 1929, the War Department took legal action forcing Channel Steel Company to pay £1,300 compensation for the breach of covenant. The next month, the same Department sold the land to … the Channel Steel Company!
At the same time, Tilden Smith leased 24 acres of land at Langdon Hole from the War Department for cement works that would utilise chalk from Dover’s white cliffs. He also planned steel and brick works nearby – that was to be part of his plan for East Kent to become the New Industrial Eden. While on 17 March 1927, Southern Railway sought permission to carry coal on the Sea Front Railway and along the Eastern Arm of the Eastern Dockyard to specially built giant bunkers.
Tilden Smith’s, now 7½ mile, aerial ropeway from Tilmanstone colliery to the Eastern Arm was formerly opened on 14 February 1930. The ceremony was simple as Tilden Smith had died suddenly in the House of Commons on 18 December 1929. The tunnels, through which the ropeway ran to the Eastern Arm, can still be seen.
Bunkers were built but in August 1928 a huge coal staithe to be installed at the end of Eastern Arm, was commissioned by Southern Railway. It was built of ferro-concrete by the Yorkshire Hennebique Construction Company and held 5000-tons of coal. The Staithe was fitted with electronic discharging mechanism that enabled a vessel to be loaded with 500 tons of coal an hour and cost £22,000.
DHB withdrew its proposal to close the Western entrance and focused on increasing the number of coal sidings at the Eastern Dockyard. It was clear that this was to enable the export of coal from Pearson Dorman Long’s Snowdown and Betteshanger collieries. The electronic coal staithe officially started operating on 19 April 1932. The first ship was Dover’s steamer Kenneth Hawksfield, which was loaded with 2,450 tons coal from Snowdown Colliery.
Although it was suggested that a rail link would be built through a tunnel from the Eastern Arm to join the Deal railway line at Kearsney, until such time the Sea Front railway was to be used. It was anticipated that the railway would be in use 14-hours a day and would carry 800,000tons of coal a year together with scrap iron and oil for refuelling ships. The coal was transported on the Sea Front Railway.
The first train from Snowdown Colliery at 09.00 and in the next 23-hours, 18 trainloads of coal was carried on the Sea Front Railway line choking its whole course with dust. 17,000 Dovorians signed a petition that was sent to the House of Lords. Parliament restricted the use of the Railway to carrying a maximum of 500,000 tons of coal a year and only during day light. In 1933, Parliament approved a DHB Bill for a 1.75-mile railway line from the Kearsney junction, on the Deal line, through a tunnel to the Eastern dockyard. Although this would have obviated the need of the Sea Front Railway to carry coal, with the death of Sir William Crundall, the Chairman of DHB, in 1934, the scheme was abandoned as too expensive.
On 1 April 1934, Dover Borough municipal boundaries were extended bringing in to the Borough, Eastern Dockyard and Arm but the cliffs overlooking the area remained part of the Rural District. That same year, the council resurrected the idea of finishing the Cliff Road to St Margaret’s utilising the earlier Light Railway Company’s permit. This had been renewed every year and was given added impetus in 1937 when, due to war preparations and the shortage of scrap iron, the remaining track of what had once been the Pearsons line was lifted.
Following the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), the War Office instigated the building of the Martin Mill Military Railway, operated and manned by the Royal Engineers and using diesel locomotives. The line followed the original Pearsons route from Martin Mill to a point called RDF Junction, about 900 feet ( 275 metres) past the then Dover-Deal road bridge. Here it divided, with the ‘main line’ turning north-east to service the guns, Winnie and Pooh. Passing beneath Winnie’s gun barrel it crossed the St Margaret’s – Martin Mill Road to Pooh’s position.
A second line, from the RDF Junction, went straight ahead for about half a mile, then in a north-east direction for another half a mile. This served the Wanstone and South Foreland Batteries. The battery close to the Dover Patrol Memorial, Point at Leathercote Point, was served by a branch line from Decoy Junction – this was named after a dummy Winnie, on the ‘main line’.
Winnie and Pooh were two 14-inch ex-naval guns manned by the Royal Marines and were capable of firing their missiles across the 21-mile wide Dover Strait to France. Winnie was installed during the Battle of Britain, in 1940 on St Margaret’s golf links and was soon after joined by Pooh, located along the Kingsdown Road.
In August 1942 Jane and Clem, two 15-inch guns, came into operation overlooking Fan Bay Battery, an emergency battery with three six-inch guns. Jane was originally designed for HMS Repulse and named after a Daily Mirror cartoon character. Clem was said to be named after the Labour leader Clement Attlee (1883-1967) or Winston Churchill’s (1874-1965) wife Clementine (1885-1977)! These were wire wound guns made of a composite of steel and steel wire. The construction was introduced in the 1890’s to deal with the increased pressures in the barrel caused by the use of the then new propellant – cordite. Radar was installed and linked with the guns that proved successful.
There were also three 13.5-inch calibre railway guns manned by Royal Marines and called Gladiator, Piecemaker and Sceneshifter. During periods of inaction, these guns were normally hidden in the Guston tunnel but sometimes in tunnels at Shepherdswell and Martin Mill.
The Battery at South Foreland was equipped with four 9.2-inch guns, while near the Dover Patrol Memorial was the Bruce gun. An experimental, hypervelocity gun built by Vickers and weighing 86-tons. The barrel was 60 feet long and could fire a shell weighing 256lbs over a distance of 100,000 yards – 57-miles. However, it was never fired in anger due to the enormous pressure affecting the shell fuses causing some to explode prematurely in mid-flight. All the real guns were hidden under camouflage netting, while dummy ones were partially concealed on the cliff top site, which accounts for the reason why the cliff top is pitted with craters.
By late 1944, the operational use of the Martin Mill Military Railway was declining, only being used to move stores and equipment. Following the end of hostilities, the Light Railway Company resumed management and some of the track was sold for export to Tanganyika as part of the ill-fated Groundnut Scheme (1947-1951). However, beyond that and seeking repeated extensions, nothing else happened and in 1952, the company officially ceased trading.
By that time, the route across the cliffs had become a favourite walk but in the spring of 1954, due to the Cold War, the military began erecting a 5-foot chestnut fence on either side of what had been the 6-foot wide track. Vigorous protests were made and the military agreed to remove the fence from the seaward side except where it enclosed military installations. Three years later the Big Guns – Jane, Clem, Winnie and Pooh were dismantled and uprooted from their reinforced concrete emplacements. The smaller guns were also removed.
About 200 acres of land, which had been commandeered by the military between Dover and St Margaret’s, was de-requisitioned following the stand-down of Coastal Artillery in 1956. Much of the remaining railway track was lifted although the rails and bridges at the Martin Mill end were still in situ in 1960. At that time, the Ministry of Transport was considering using the track for a motorway approach to Eastern Docks.
Finally, during the post-war period, Marine Parade was widened and the Sea Front Railway safety fence was removed. In order to tell tourists to remove their parked cars off the track, a man with a red flag walked in front of the trains! Robert Eade, Dover’s Mayor in 1961, was one. By that time freight traffic, using the service was declining and the last train – a diesel locomotive pulling three wagons, ran on the 31 December 1964. The lines were eventually covered with tarmac.
doverhistorian.com/2013/11/07/dover-st-margarets-and-mart...
In the 21st century, before anything is built, before a spade breaks the earth, a whole series of legal processes must take place to ensure that no one's point of view is not heard.
Our Victorian forebears had no such issues of course, if they saw that something needed to built, then whatever was in its way, it would be torn down so progress could be made.
Not always the best way to do things, but this attitude helped the track millage in Britain increase year on year in the 19th century. And then, with the dawning of the 20th century, no more main lines were built in Britain, until the CTRL.
But back to the matter in hand. Imagine, someone had an idea of defacing that great symbol of Britain, the White Cliffs of Dover, by building a ten metre wide shelf in them and running a railway up them, a railway which would only be open for a decade at most. Clearly there would be public uproar. Will it ever be built?
Well, it was built, the cliffs were scarred, the railway built, used and ripped up. The shelf, The Cliff Road, is still there, leading from under Jubilee Way up round the top of Langdon Hole. It is possible to look at Google Earth and see the trackbed crossing Reach Road, Deal Road before running alongside the Deal to Dover line, the line from the cliffs losing height until at Martin Mill, they had their junction.
Then, during WWII, rail mounted guns were needed to fire across the channel, the track was relaid, and new lines laid in arcs of fire, so the guns could recoil and make aiming easier.
After the way, the track was taken up again, bridges dismantled and mostly forgotten.
Many thanks, then, to my friend Paul Wells for posting shots of these rails, recently uncovered after clearance of mud on an old military road, the only trace, other than The Cliff Road, that remains of the railway.
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At the cliff end of Athol Terrace, near Eastern Docks, Dover, a steep footpath leads up the cliff and then along Langdon Cliffs towards St Margaret’s. From the footpath, one can watch the daily activities of Dover’s Eastern Docks and Channel shipping beyond. On clear day, the coast France with the Strait of Dover, like a wide river, in between is quite a site. As one traverses the path, it becomes apparent that it was once a railway track.
The story begins in 1892 when Dover Harbour Board (DHB) accepted the tender of John Jackson (1851-1919) for the building of the Eastern Arm of the new Commercial Harbour - the Prince of Wales Pier. Four years later, in August 1896, the Undercliff Reclamation Act received Royal Assent. The Act was for laying out land on the South Foreland, near St Margaret’s, where a new ‘Dover’ was to be built.
The Parliamentary Bill had been sponsored by Sir William Crundall (1847-1934), thirteen times Mayor of Dover from 1886 to 1910. Crundall owned a construction company that had been founded by his late father, also called William. Both father and son were the prime movers in the development of Dover’s town planning:
- On the west side of the Dour cottages for the working class – Clarendon estate
- On the east side homes for the lower middle class i.e. Barton Road neighbourhood
- Below the Castle and nearer the sea, villas for the upper middle class i.e. the Castle Avenue estate.
The next part of their dream for Dover was to be a private estate on the South Foreland for the well-to-do upper classes.
Crundall had been appointed to DHB in 1886 and twenty years later, in 1906, he was elected Chairman of the Board. He was to hold the office until his death in 1934. Two other businessmen were involved in the proposed South Foreland scheme, Sir John Jackson, who had won the contract for building the Prince of Wales Pier. The third person involved in the South Foreland enterprise was the eminent construction engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray. His company had tendered to build the proposed Admiralty Harbour, which would enclose the whole of Dover bay.
The three men decided that access to the South Foreland site was to be by a road starting from the shore by Castle Jetty, at the east end of Dover’s seafront. It would then run along the base of the cliffs before gently rising to South Foreland at St Margaret’s. To reduce anticipated opposition while the Undercliff Reclamation Bill was going through Parliament, the main purpose given was the prevention of sea erosion at the base of the cliffs. This was substantiated by Sir John Jackson calling an expert witness who proclaimed the necessity. Dover Corporation echoed this and showed that over the previous 25 years the encroachment of the sea had given rise to numerous cliff falls.
It was agreed that in time an Undercliff marine road would be built on the inside of a seawall between Dover and St Margaret’s Bay but not in the foreseeable future. In the immediate future a road if built, they implied, would go over the cliffs. Thus the opposition centred their argument on this saying that if the over-cliff road were to go ahead, it would effectively put public land into private hands. This was dealt with by amendment to the Bill by giving the over-cliff road a lower priority than the Undercliff marine road … either way, the three men got exactly what they wanted!
Before the Bill had received parliamentary approval, excavations began. Initially, the men stated that 500 convicts from the then Langdon prison would be part of the workforce. However, Herbert Asquith, the Home Secretary, refused to comply! For the residents of Athol Terrace, permission for the compulsorily purchase of their front gardens was given and the road we see today was laid at their doorsteps.
The Admiralty Harbour, we see today, was given the go ahead by the government on 5 April 1898 when the contract was signed. Viscount Cowdray’s company (Pearsons) were the main contractors, Sir John Jackson was a subcontractor and Dover Harbour Board, under Sir William Crundall, was actively involved.
To build the Piers and the Breakwater of the new Admiralty Harbour, Pearsons used locally made concrete blocks and faced them with granite. The concrete blocks were made at two blockyards, one on Shakespeare beach in the west and the second on reclaimed land to the east of Castle Jetty, where the Undercliff marine road was proposed to start. To reclaim land the cliff face was blasted and the surplus chalk was removed by steam-navvies – locomotive driven excavators made by Ruston, Proctor & Co, Sheaf Ironworks, Lincoln. Soon a level platform, some 24½ acres (9.915 hectares), was created at the base of the eastern cliffs where the massive blocks were made and stored.
The blocks were made out of sand and shingle brought by ship from Stonar, near Sandwich and unloaded into trucks at the Castle Jetty. From there the trucks were manually pushed along a narrow-gauge track to the blockyard. However, the sea journey was subject to the vagaries of the weather and so it was decided to run a Standard gauge Light Railway line (engines could not go more than 25 miles an hour) from Martin Mill, the nearest station on the South East and Chatham Railway line between Dover and Deal.
The three and a half mile track was pegged out by June 1898. It ran from the Dover side of Martin Mill main line station parallel to the Dover – Deal line for about a mile. Crossing two roads on bridges made of brick abutments with supporting iron girders. Just before the main line Guston Tunnel the Pearson line veered south towards the coast and then along an embankment passing under the Dover-Deal road (A258) near the Swingate Inn. Past Bere Farm, West Cliffe, the line continued south-east crossing the Dover -St Margaret’s Upper Road by a gate. It then turned south-west, following the cliff contours, skirting Langdon Bay. Running west, it followed the edge of Langdon Cliff for about half a mile where metal frames were erected on the cliff edge to stop chalk falling on the works below.
Much of the land that the Pearson railway, as it was called, crossed, was owned by the Cliff Land Company the principal owner of which was Frederick George North, 8th Earl of Guilford (1876–1949) of Waldershare Park. Back in 1844, with the coming of the South Eastern Railway to Dover, the Guilford family had made an application to build 1,500 houses on land to the north of the Castle with an approach road from Castle Jetty. The family still had this dream and the 8th Earl made a deal with Pearsons to charge £25 per year ground rent with the option to buy the standard gauge line, once the lease had expired, for £3,000. It was planned that the Cliff Land Company would use the railway for a passenger service to the development. From Langdon Hole to East Cliff the land was owned by the War Office. They stipulated that the track was to be completed by December 1899. Further, that the Pearson railway was only to be used for carrying materials and the site had to be restored to its original condition.
At the end of the line was a chute down which the materials were fed to the block yard. This quickly proved a problem and was replaced by a funicular, down the cliff face, with side tipping skips to ease unloading. At the bottom, the skips were pushed by hand along a narrow-gauge track built on trestles to the blockyard and emptied into one of six lines of mixers where some 250 blocks were made at once. These were moved by blockyard goliaths – cranes with a span of 100-feet that could lift 50-tons.
The excavations were not without problems. In October 1898, fuses and explosives were taken and deliberately fired at the rear of the sea front East Cliff houses. In September 1899, Albert Knowler was killed during blasting and three months later, a fire in the East Cliff office burnt a man to death. Then, on 19 January 1900, as men were preparing to blast some more of the cliff face there was a massive explosion. Five men, George Jeffries, aged 24, – who later died – James Murton, Ernest Dutton, William Davies and Algenon Gibbs were all injured. In May 1900, labourer Bill Chadwick age-32, was killed by a lump of chalk during blasting at East Cliff.
Neither was the new railway line without controversy, much to the annoyance of the local tourist industry it caused the North Fall Tunnel, a pathway created by the Dover Chamber of Commerce in 1870 to provide a short cut from the beach to the Castle, to be destroyed. In its place, a new path with a steep gradient was excavated up to Broadlees, some distance east of the Castle. This path was expected to be extended in the direction of St Margaret’s Bay and eventually to become the over-cliff road, one of the two options that was envisaged to connected Dover with New Dover – the superlative estate that Crundall, Jackson and Cowdray planned to build at the South Foreland.
The actual building of the Eastern Arm was started in January 1901 and Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson applied for a Light Railway Order to extend the Pearson railway to the South Foreland. A Light Railway order would allow the trains to run on a standard track but at no more than 25 miles an hour, however, this the degree of regulation was less than that applied to main line services and therefore cheaper to set up, run and maintain. The proposal said that the line would run from Athol Terrace, up a 1-in-28 gradient along a 60-foot wide ‘road’ cut into the face of the cliff to Langdon Battery. It would then cross the fields to St Margaret’s to the proposed site of New Dover, before continuing to Martin Mill and joining the main line.
The application stated that it would be a tram/railway service powered by electricity - the local electricity company was then in private ownership and Crundall was the Chairman. There was also the stated intention of extending the line from the Eastern Dockyard, as it became to be called, along Dover’s seafront, Union Street, Strond Street and then to the Harbour station, on the western side of what became the Western Docks. There the proposed line would join the main South East and Chatham Railway line. Another line would go from the existing Deal line at Buckland and then via River to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley.
In April 1902 a public inquiry, headed by the Earl of Jersey, was held into the application. It was agreed that the Company could lay down lines for a light railway in the Borough of Dover, but they could not exercise that power for two years. This was to give time to Dover Corporation, if desirable, to obtain the authority to extend their tramways. Further, on the proposed light railway to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley, this was to terminate at River church and go no further. The application explicitly stated that the tram/railway would be a passenger service, which contravened the agreement with the Earl of Guilford. He immediately sought legal advice and eventually laid out his landholdings on the cliff top as a seaside residential resort.
Crundall, against considerable opposition, in 1907, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
At the western end of the harbour, the Admiralty Pier extension was completed in 1908 and South Eastern Railway Company, with representatives on the Dover Harbour Board, proposed to erect a grand new terminal station at the landward end. Early the following year, Crundall, as Chairman of DHB, invited tenders to widen Admiralty Pier for the possibility of a new railway station. The Lords of the Admiralty visited and discussed the proposals and on 9 December, Pearsons were given the contract.
The Admiralty Harbour was officially opened on the 15 October 1909 by the Prince of Wales, later George V (1910-1936) who unveiled a stone commemorating the event on the Eastern Arm. Two months before, on 9 August, the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company (Light Railway Company) was formed. Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson owned 25 shares each and four others owned one share each. One of these shareholders was Richard Tilden-Smith who later became the main shareholder of Tilmanstone Colliery.
Later that month planning permission was given by Dover Corporation for the utilisation of the Light Railway Company line as a public tramway. The residents of East Cliff objected but their concerns were dismissed by the Corporation and John Bavington Jones, of the Dover Express.
Work started on 21 July 1910 to widen the shore end of the Admiralty Pier for the new railway station comprising of over 11 acres. Chalk for in-filling was taken from East Cliff excavated by the steam-navvy machines. The excavations also created a new road. However, because of the cliffs are so steep when the ‘road’ reached the top it had to be cut in a series of zigzags. This problem was expected to be dealt with later, when the rest of the road was nearing completion.
At the base of East Cliff, railway lines were used to transport the chalk to Castle Jetty where it was loaded onto barges and taken across to Admiralty Pier. In 1910, while the excavations were going on, Channel Collieries Trust was set up to purchase land near South Foreland. Their remit stated that they would build a residential estate, approached by a Cliff Road and the St Margaret’s Light Railway from Dover. The Trust syndicate was composed of … Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson! The road from the excavations was started on 21 July 1910.
The last coping stone on the Admiralty Pier extension was laid by Crundall on 2 April 1913. A month later work started on building the Marine Station, the foundations having been filled in by 1 million cubic yards of chalk from the eastern cliffs.
Two months before, in February 1913, DHB chaired by Crundall, filed a Parliamentary Bill to make changes to the Tidal Basin at the Western Docks. As a supplementary, the Channel Collieries Trust sort consent to replace the western half of the seafront and beach with a 5.75 acre dock and terminus for a Light Railway Company. This went down badly in Dover and a petition was raised followed by a poll that took place on 20 May 1913. Of those eligible to vote, 2,265 voted against the Bill’s Supplement and 1,508 for it. The Supplement was withdrawn.
On 13 April, a closed meeting of the Light Railway Company was held when it was announced that Cowdray and Crundall had sold their shares, by transfer, to the Channel Collieries Trust. The four holders of the single shares in Light Railway Company were not invited to the meeting – the first they heard about it was when they read the national newspapers. A bitter legal battle ensued with Richard Tilden-Smith unsuccessfully trying to seek redress. In the event, Sir John Jackson and two nominees owned the controlling shares in the Light Railway Company.
At the time, the East Kent coalmining industry was taking off. Arthur Burr, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder of several companies with interests in the Kent coalfield, was the leading light. One of these companies was Kent Coal Concessions. Arthur Burr had formed it in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. The intention was lease the coalfields for a share of the royalties. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries.
East Kent Colliery Company also was part of Burr’s portfolio and its holdings included, Shakespeare and Snowdown Collieries. Shakespeare Colliery was sunk in 1896, but had not proved viable and was finally abandoned in December 1915. However, Snowdown, north of Dover, saw the first commercial East Kent coal raised on 19 November 1912. About that time, Burr announced the intention of floating a new company, as a subsidiary of Kent Coal Concessions, to ‘exploit undeveloped areas of East Kent.’
A previous similar floatation had not been a commercial success and the Company Board were not happy. The situation came to a head at a meeting on 31 July 1913 when Burr, along with his son, Dr Malcolm Burr, were ‘retired’ from the Board. The remaining directors consolidated Kent Coal Concessions with allied companies including Kent Collieries Ltd that had extensive mineral rights and had been undertaking mineral exploration. Towards the end of 1913 the giant steel firm, Dorman Long, in which Cowdray was involved, reported that they held 30,000 shares in the Channel Collieries Trust Company, whose holdings included the East Kent Colliery Company, part of the Burr portfolio. Borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. Dorman Long also had interests in Kent Collieries Ltd.
Just prior to World War I (1914-1918), in May 1914, Burr attempted to raise £77,000 in debentures and £800,000 in income bonds for his East Kent Colliery Company. However, little interest was shown and the holdings were handed over to Kent Coal Concessions, by the Official Receiver, with the remit to consolidate. Following consolidation the company held mineral rights under some 20,000 acres of East Kent. In December 1917, Burr was declared bankrupt with debts amounting to £53,176 but he died in September 1919 age 70.
At Dorman Long & Co.’s AGM held in August 1917, it was reported that their investments, through the Channel Collieries Trust Ltd, were a satisfactory £877,304, even though the War had stopped any further excavations. Albeit, with the consent of the Treasury, a fusion of the different East Kent coal interests was agreed with the two chief companies, Kent Collieries Ltd and the Channel Collieries Trust put into voluntary liquidation. Out of this, the Channel Steel Company was formed with a capital of £750,000. It was reported to the assembled shareholders that it was the existence of a large deposit of ironstone in East Kent that had provided the name of the new company.
Sir William Crundall – Chairman of Dover Harbour Board;
Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray – whose company, Pearsons, had successfully tendered to build the Admiralty Harbour,
Sir John Jackson who had been involved in the building the Admiralty Harbour. The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The company had applied, in 1914, for the renewal of their powers to carry coal through the streets of Dover with a view to extending the line from the Western docks to the Eastern Dockyard. The Town Council opposed this, but due to outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), the case was deferred. In order to carry explosives to war-ships berthed in the Camber, at the eastern Dockyard, the War Office decided to build a Sea Front Railway, using the powers that were likely to have been awarded to the Light Railway Company.
Pearson’s successfully tendered and work on what was to become the Sea Front Railway was eventually started in 1918. Single-track and running the length of the promenade from the Prince of Wales Pier to the Eastern Dockyard, the lines that had been used for the Pearson Line and belonging to the Light Railway Company, were taken up and used. It had passing loops and catch points so that trains could run in both directions but soon after the line was laid an accident occurred so a low fence was erected on each side.
Following the death of Sir John Jackson, in December 1919, the Light Railway Company was taken over by the Channel Steel Company. They applied, in 1920, to run a line from the Sea Front Railway at New Bridge, along Camden Crescent, then Liverpool Street (now the rear of the Gateway flats), and following the base of the cliffs to Eastern Dockyard. It was expected that the cliff side residences of East Cliff and Athol Terrace would be demolished.
At the Eastern Dockyard it was envisaged that a railway station would be built and the previously cut road would become a railway track that through a newly constructed tunnel, would join the track of the old Pearsons line. This would then be extended Sea Street, St Margaret’s where another station would be built. The line would then cross the countryside to join the Dover-Deal railway line at Martin Mill.
The new proposal was given outline approval by Dover Corporation with the preference for the construction to be a road not a railway track. This was due to the continuing rise in unemployment in the town – a situation that was prevalent throughout the country at the time – more men could be employed to build a road then a railway. If, however, the company were mindful to create a railway then, the Corporation said, their preference was for the facility to be a tramway, similar to that, which already existed in Dover at the time. Finally, whatever the company decided, colliery trucks could only be used on land purchased by the company and the track could not go through the town.
The Company chose the road option following the route given in the outline proposal. It was to be 50feet (16 metres) wide with a 15-feet (5 metres) wide pavement on each side. The estimated cost was £43,000 and it was expected to provide employment for up to 300 men. The council suggested that Pearsons paid one third, the Corporation a third and it would be expected that the government’s Unemployment Grants Committee would pay the remainder.
In the autumn of 1922, Pearsons joined forces with steel makers Dorman Long, to form Pearson & Dorman Long Company and take over most of the rights from the Kent Coal Concessions. The latter company had been set up by Arthur Burr, the East Kent mining entrepreneur, in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries. Burr’s large portfolio of mining associated companies in East Kent were consolidated in 1913 under the name of Kent Coal Concessions. The giant steel makers, Dorman Long held 30,000 shares in the consolidated company as borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. In 1917, a partial consolidation had created the Channel Steel Company and included Snowdown Colliery. Although Kent Coal Concessions did retain some mineral rights, due to the economic depression no one was interested in leasing them and in 1925, the company folded.
Having amalgamated the newly styled Pearson Dorman Long company immediately started the preliminary work on what resulted in Betteshanger Colliery. However, as they did not own the surface land they were unable to sink the pit. Albeit, through the subsidiary, Channel Steel Company, they proposed building a steel works between Dover and St Margaret’s adjacent to the proposed new road and Dover Corporation gave their approval.
The council applied to the Unemployment Grants Committee stating that the cost for the new road was £56,000. The Committee asked for the plans to be modified and suggested that the Ministry of Transport and Kent County Council (KCC) should contribute towards the costs. While these applications were being made the road was put on hold. During the winter of 1923-24, the revised estimate had increased to £129,000 but government financing was not forthcoming.
On 29 September 1923, the Admiralty formerly handed the port over to the Dover Harbour Board (DHB), still headed by Sir William Crundall. This included the Sea Front Railway line but the Eastern Dockyard was retained by the Admiralty and let on lease to Stanlee Ship-breaking Company. The Camber was retained for Admiralty purposes.
During spring and summer of 1924, Dover’s Mayor, Richard Barwick, and the Town Clerk, Reginald Knocker, visited various government departments laying before them the urgent need for unemployment relief. The Ministry of Transport relented and sanctioned the borrowing of £45,000. In the autumn of 1924 sites near Kingsdown were put on the market through Protheroe and Morris of Cheapside, London. Channel Collieries Trust held the mineral rights under the property and the sites were bought by Pearson Dorman Long – at last, they could sink Betteshanger Colliery.
Unemployment continued to rise and in 1925 DHB applied to Parliament to close Dover harbour’s Western entrance. They wanted to run a railway line along the Southern Breakwater to load Kent coal onto ships for export from there. However, the disparity in exchange rates between the UK and the Continent meant that the country was importing coal and the application came under a lot of criticism.
On the subject of Exchange Rate parity and the negative effect it was having on British industry, Sir Arthur Dorman made a powerful and well reported speech (Economist 19.12.1925). He begged the government for equal parity in the exchange rates but the response was: ‘a strong £ was the sign of a strong country.‘ Pearson Dorman Long wrote to the council saying that they could no longer afford to contribute to the cost of the road.
Cheap imports of coal continued to affect the domestic industry but in February 1926, the government did give a grant of £2m to the Kent coalfields. However, at midnight on 3 May saw the beginning of the General Strike. In October, that year, the council finally heard from the Unemployment Grants Committee through a letter sent to the town’s Member of Parliament (1922 -1945), Major the Hon. John Jacob Astor. The Committee had declined to provide a grant for the East Cliff Road, the reason given was that ‘unemployment in Dover was not sufficiently exceptional to warrant relief.’ It was generally felt that the refusal was retaliatory because East Kent miners had joined the national strike.
Richard Tilden Smith, who had been involved in a bitter legal action against the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company in 1913, bought Tilmanstone Colliery from the Official Receiver in November 1926. At the same time an application was made by Tilmanstone (Kent) Collieries Ltd for the right to carry an aerial ropeway for a distance of 6½ miles (this was stated in the original application) from their colliery. This was to include a tunnel being cut through the cliffs to the Eastern Dockyard. The proposed course extended over land owned by 18 different personages one of which was Southern Railway. Although permission was granted, Southern Railway, and the Pearson, Dorman Long’s Channel Steel Company appealed but this was overturned and works started.
In 1927 Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, died. Under the 1896 terms of agreement between the War Department and Pearsons, the line from East Cliff to Langdon Hole had to be restored to its original condition. In May 1929, the War Department took legal action forcing Channel Steel Company to pay £1,300 compensation for the breach of covenant. The next month, the same Department sold the land to … the Channel Steel Company!
At the same time, Tilden Smith leased 24 acres of land at Langdon Hole from the War Department for cement works that would utilise chalk from Dover’s white cliffs. He also planned steel and brick works nearby – that was to be part of his plan for East Kent to become the New Industrial Eden. While on 17 March 1927, Southern Railway sought permission to carry coal on the Sea Front Railway and along the Eastern Arm of the Eastern Dockyard to specially built giant bunkers.
Tilden Smith’s, now 7½ mile, aerial ropeway from Tilmanstone colliery to the Eastern Arm was formerly opened on 14 February 1930. The ceremony was simple as Tilden Smith had died suddenly in the House of Commons on 18 December 1929. The tunnels, through which the ropeway ran to the Eastern Arm, can still be seen.
Bunkers were built but in August 1928 a huge coal staithe to be installed at the end of Eastern Arm, was commissioned by Southern Railway. It was built of ferro-concrete by the Yorkshire Hennebique Construction Company and held 5000-tons of coal. The Staithe was fitted with electronic discharging mechanism that enabled a vessel to be loaded with 500 tons of coal an hour and cost £22,000.
DHB withdrew its proposal to close the Western entrance and focused on increasing the number of coal sidings at the Eastern Dockyard. It was clear that this was to enable the export of coal from Pearson Dorman Long’s Snowdown and Betteshanger collieries. The electronic coal staithe officially started operating on 19 April 1932. The first ship was Dover’s steamer Kenneth Hawksfield, which was loaded with 2,450 tons coal from Snowdown Colliery.
Although it was suggested that a rail link would be built through a tunnel from the Eastern Arm to join the Deal railway line at Kearsney, until such time the Sea Front railway was to be used. It was anticipated that the railway would be in use 14-hours a day and would carry 800,000tons of coal a year together with scrap iron and oil for refuelling ships. The coal was transported on the Sea Front Railway.
The first train from Snowdown Colliery at 09.00 and in the next 23-hours, 18 trainloads of coal was carried on the Sea Front Railway line choking its whole course with dust. 17,000 Dovorians signed a petition that was sent to the House of Lords. Parliament restricted the use of the Railway to carrying a maximum of 500,000 tons of coal a year and only during day light. In 1933, Parliament approved a DHB Bill for a 1.75-mile railway line from the Kearsney junction, on the Deal line, through a tunnel to the Eastern dockyard. Although this would have obviated the need of the Sea Front Railway to carry coal, with the death of Sir William Crundall, the Chairman of DHB, in 1934, the scheme was abandoned as too expensive.
On 1 April 1934, Dover Borough municipal boundaries were extended bringing in to the Borough, Eastern Dockyard and Arm but the cliffs overlooking the area remained part of the Rural District. That same year, the council resurrected the idea of finishing the Cliff Road to St Margaret’s utilising the earlier Light Railway Company’s permit. This had been renewed every year and was given added impetus in 1937 when, due to war preparations and the shortage of scrap iron, the remaining track of what had once been the Pearsons line was lifted.
Following the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), the War Office instigated the building of the Martin Mill Military Railway, operated and manned by the Royal Engineers and using diesel locomotives. The line followed the original Pearsons route from Martin Mill to a point called RDF Junction, about 900 feet ( 275 metres) past the then Dover-Deal road bridge. Here it divided, with the ‘main line’ turning north-east to service the guns, Winnie and Pooh. Passing beneath Winnie’s gun barrel it crossed the St Margaret’s – Martin Mill Road to Pooh’s position.
A second line, from the RDF Junction, went straight ahead for about half a mile, then in a north-east direction for another half a mile. This served the Wanstone and South Foreland Batteries. The battery close to the Dover Patrol Memorial, Point at Leathercote Point, was served by a branch line from Decoy Junction – this was named after a dummy Winnie, on the ‘main line’.
Winnie and Pooh were two 14-inch ex-naval guns manned by the Royal Marines and were capable of firing their missiles across the 21-mile wide Dover Strait to France. Winnie was installed during the Battle of Britain, in 1940 on St Margaret’s golf links and was soon after joined by Pooh, located along the Kingsdown Road.
In August 1942 Jane and Clem, two 15-inch guns, came into operation overlooking Fan Bay Battery, an emergency battery with three six-inch guns. Jane was originally designed for HMS Repulse and named after a Daily Mirror cartoon character. Clem was said to be named after the Labour leader Clement Attlee (1883-1967) or Winston Churchill’s (1874-1965) wife Clementine (1885-1977)! These were wire wound guns made of a composite of steel and steel wire. The construction was introduced in the 1890’s to deal with the increased pressures in the barrel caused by the use of the then new propellant – cordite. Radar was installed and linked with the guns that proved successful.
There were also three 13.5-inch calibre railway guns manned by Royal Marines and called Gladiator, Piecemaker and Sceneshifter. During periods of inaction, these guns were normally hidden in the Guston tunnel but sometimes in tunnels at Shepherdswell and Martin Mill.
The Battery at South Foreland was equipped with four 9.2-inch guns, while near the Dover Patrol Memorial was the Bruce gun. An experimental, hypervelocity gun built by Vickers and weighing 86-tons. The barrel was 60 feet long and could fire a shell weighing 256lbs over a distance of 100,000 yards – 57-miles. However, it was never fired in anger due to the enormous pressure affecting the shell fuses causing some to explode prematurely in mid-flight. All the real guns were hidden under camouflage netting, while dummy ones were partially concealed on the cliff top site, which accounts for the reason why the cliff top is pitted with craters.
By late 1944, the operational use of the Martin Mill Military Railway was declining, only being used to move stores and equipment. Following the end of hostilities, the Light Railway Company resumed management and some of the track was sold for export to Tanganyika as part of the ill-fated Groundnut Scheme (1947-1951). However, beyond that and seeking repeated extensions, nothing else happened and in 1952, the company officially ceased trading.
By that time, the route across the cliffs had become a favourite walk but in the spring of 1954, due to the Cold War, the military began erecting a 5-foot chestnut fence on either side of what had been the 6-foot wide track. Vigorous protests were made and the military agreed to remove the fence from the seaward side except where it enclosed military installations. Three years later the Big Guns – Jane, Clem, Winnie and Pooh were dismantled and uprooted from their reinforced concrete emplacements. The smaller guns were also removed.
About 200 acres of land, which had been commandeered by the military between Dover and St Margaret’s, was de-requisitioned following the stand-down of Coastal Artillery in 1956. Much of the remaining railway track was lifted although the rails and bridges at the Martin Mill end were still in situ in 1960. At that time, the Ministry of Transport was considering using the track for a motorway approach to Eastern Docks.
Finally, during the post-war period, Marine Parade was widened and the Sea Front Railway safety fence was removed. In order to tell tourists to remove their parked cars off the track, a man with a red flag walked in front of the trains! Robert Eade, Dover’s Mayor in 1961, was one. By that time freight traffic, using the service was declining and the last train – a diesel locomotive pulling three wagons, ran on the 31 December 1964. The lines were eventually covered with tarmac.
doverhistorian.com/2013/11/07/dover-st-margarets-and-mart...
Right im a bit annoyed with the Barret compensator being there but i couldnt do anything about it because it was of the screen :/ But yeah, i finished up the rifle in the early hours of this morning hope you all like it :)
2015 #4/5 Arkham Knight Batmobile.
Hot Wheels.
HW Batman Series.
Escala 1/64.
Made in Malaysia.
-------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile
Debut Series
HW City - Batman
Produced
2015-present
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Batman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it is the successor to the 2013 video game Batman: Arkham Origins, and the fourth main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. Arkham Knight was released worldwide on June 23, 2015."
(...)
Batmobile
"The game introduces the Batmobile as a drivable vehicle. The bulletproof Batmobile can be summoned to the player's location while on foot or, if the player is airborne, summoned to meet Batman as he lands.The vehicle features the ability to perform jumps, speed boosts, rotate on the spot, smash through objects like barricades and trees, and fire missiles that can immobilize enemy vehicles. Batman can eject from the Batmobile and immediately begin gliding around Gotham City."
(...)
"The Batmobile has two modes, which can be switched at any time: Pursuit and Battle.
Pursuit is for moving from area to area and completing specific driving challenges.
In Battle mode, the Batmobile becomes more tank than car, allowing a full 360-degree range of movement, including strafing in any direction, while revealing the multiple weapon systems on board, including a Vulcan chain gun for quick damage, a 60mm hypervelocity cannon for fire support, anti-tank guided missiles for wide-ranging damage against multiple targets, and a non-lethal riot suppressor."
(...)
----------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
Developer(s)
Rocksteady Studios
Publisher(s)
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Director(s)
Sefton Hill
Producer(s)
Daniel Bailie
Nathan Burlow
Designer(s)
Ian Ball
Programmer(s)
Ben Wyatt
Artist(s)
David Hego
Writer(s)
Martin Lancaster
Sefton Hill
Ian Ball
Composer(s)
Nick Arundel
David Buckley
Series
Batman: Arkham
Engine
Unreal Engine 3
Platform(s)
Microsoft Windows
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Release date(s)
WW: June 23, 2015
Genre(s)
Action-adventure
Mode(s)
Single-player
Sources: hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight_Batmobile
(BEST SEEN HEROICALLY LARGE !!)
"HAIR OF THE GOD, MORTAL?"
"OWWWARGGGH !! GOTTA THUNDERING GREAT HEADACHE !! WHAT IN THE NAME OF SIR ISAMBARD BLOODY KINGDOM BRUNEL DID I DRINK LAST NIGHT?"
Poor old Tony Stark, he's been through the Ringer. The Civil War. The Aftermath. Captain America's assassination. Assembling the new Avengers and the national registered superhero teams. Mortally wounded in the Hypervelocity attacks. Subverted by Ultron. Now he's Director of SHIELD, not to mention the Illuminati crisis and the looming return of a considerably peeved Hulk to Earth.
To top it all they've cast Robert Downey Junior to play him in the Iron Man movie....
Something had to give.
He fell off the wagon.
And when Iron Man falls he falls far and hits hard.
And what he hits hardest is...himself.
Tony Stark's teammates in the Avengers knew all about his alcoholism and decided that the God of Thunder, Mighty Thor, should take a whack at applying aversion therapy.
Good old Thor. You can always rely upon him to hammer out a solution.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, Irony Man is back! What can I say, but deny any and all rumours that Mr Stark has been away in rehab.
The benchtop set didn't need to be too complex for this shot. The backdrop is the reverse side of my drawing board. The widgets in front of it are the baseplates for Asylum Klingon action figures. The cartoon Iron Man and Thor are from the Marvel Super Hero Squad range, and were packaged together. Bemusingly, I've had this idea stuck in the back of my head for a while, the coincidental team-up just made it easier to knock it loose!
I didn't want to make this another Noirish shot, mainly because a hangover in the full blaze of morning light is even worse! I couldn't resist bumping up the lighting levels with some appropriate thunderbolts. I used lens flares and specialised brushes including some custom Photoshop Lighning Bolt brushes found here:
Oh, and who else should Tony Stark, supergenius, swear by but the great engineer Sir Isambard?
2015 #4/5 Arkham Knight Batmobile.
Hot Wheels.
HW Batman Series.
Escala 1/64.
Made in Malaysia.
-------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile
Debut Series
HW City - Batman
Produced
2015-present
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Batman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it is the successor to the 2013 video game Batman: Arkham Origins, and the fourth main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. Arkham Knight was released worldwide on June 23, 2015."
(...)
Batmobile
"The game introduces the Batmobile as a drivable vehicle. The bulletproof Batmobile can be summoned to the player's location while on foot or, if the player is airborne, summoned to meet Batman as he lands.The vehicle features the ability to perform jumps, speed boosts, rotate on the spot, smash through objects like barricades and trees, and fire missiles that can immobilize enemy vehicles. Batman can eject from the Batmobile and immediately begin gliding around Gotham City."
(...)
"The Batmobile has two modes, which can be switched at any time: Pursuit and Battle.
Pursuit is for moving from area to area and completing specific driving challenges.
In Battle mode, the Batmobile becomes more tank than car, allowing a full 360-degree range of movement, including strafing in any direction, while revealing the multiple weapon systems on board, including a Vulcan chain gun for quick damage, a 60mm hypervelocity cannon for fire support, anti-tank guided missiles for wide-ranging damage against multiple targets, and a non-lethal riot suppressor."
(...)
----------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
Developer(s)
Rocksteady Studios
Publisher(s)
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Director(s)
Sefton Hill
Producer(s)
Daniel Bailie
Nathan Burlow
Designer(s)
Ian Ball
Programmer(s)
Ben Wyatt
Artist(s)
David Hego
Writer(s)
Martin Lancaster
Sefton Hill
Ian Ball
Composer(s)
Nick Arundel
David Buckley
Series
Batman: Arkham
Engine
Unreal Engine 3
Platform(s)
Microsoft Windows
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Release date(s)
WW: June 23, 2015
Genre(s)
Action-adventure
Mode(s)
Single-player
Sources: hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight_Batmobile
The photo shows the "energy flash" when a projectile launched at speeds up to 17,000 mph impacts a solid surface at the Hypervelocity Ballistic Range at NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. This test is used to simulate what happens when a piece of orbital debris hits a spacecraft in orbit.
Credit: NASA
Image Number: A-6058
Date: Circa 1963
2015 #4/5 Arkham Knight Batmobile.
Hot Wheels.
HW Batman Series.
Escala 1/64.
Made in Malaysia.
-------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile
Debut Series
HW City - Batman
Produced
2015-present
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Batman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it is the successor to the 2013 video game Batman: Arkham Origins, and the fourth main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. Arkham Knight was released worldwide on June 23, 2015."
(...)
Batmobile
"The game introduces the Batmobile as a drivable vehicle. The bulletproof Batmobile can be summoned to the player's location while on foot or, if the player is airborne, summoned to meet Batman as he lands.The vehicle features the ability to perform jumps, speed boosts, rotate on the spot, smash through objects like barricades and trees, and fire missiles that can immobilize enemy vehicles. Batman can eject from the Batmobile and immediately begin gliding around Gotham City."
(...)
"The Batmobile has two modes, which can be switched at any time: Pursuit and Battle.
Pursuit is for moving from area to area and completing specific driving challenges.
In Battle mode, the Batmobile becomes more tank than car, allowing a full 360-degree range of movement, including strafing in any direction, while revealing the multiple weapon systems on board, including a Vulcan chain gun for quick damage, a 60mm hypervelocity cannon for fire support, anti-tank guided missiles for wide-ranging damage against multiple targets, and a non-lethal riot suppressor."
(...)
----------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
Developer(s)
Rocksteady Studios
Publisher(s)
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Director(s)
Sefton Hill
Producer(s)
Daniel Bailie
Nathan Burlow
Designer(s)
Ian Ball
Programmer(s)
Ben Wyatt
Artist(s)
David Hego
Writer(s)
Martin Lancaster
Sefton Hill
Ian Ball
Composer(s)
Nick Arundel
David Buckley
Series
Batman: Arkham
Engine
Unreal Engine 3
Platform(s)
Microsoft Windows
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Release date(s)
WW: June 23, 2015
Genre(s)
Action-adventure
Mode(s)
Single-player
Sources: hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight_Batmobile
(BEST SEEN LARGE IF YOU HAVE CLASS #THREE ALPHA SECURITY CLEARANCE OR HIGHER)
First appearance of the S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier “Thunder Child” (“The Mighty Avengers #1 May, 2007. Design/Dialogue by Brian Michael Bendis & Frank Cho)
MS. MARVEL: “Wow, Tony.”
TONY STARK: “I know.”
MS. MARVEL: “What was wrong with the old helicarrier exactly?”
TONY STARK: “It stunk. It actually smelled.”
MS. MARVEL: “Like cigars.”
TONY STARK: “And other things.”
MS. MARVEL: “You know, they invented carpet cleaners.”
TONY STARK: “I’m the new Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., so I get a new helicarrier.”
MS MARVEL: “Can I have the old one?”
TONY STARK: “I was thinking of tossing it up on Ebay.”
No fictional covert organisation worth its suicide capsules would be without a futuristic airborne headquarters and since 1965 Marvel Comics’ S.H.I.E.L.D (Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate) has operated a succession of fantastic and fiscally outrageous ‘helicarriers’.
Former S.H.I.E.L.D Director Nick Fury was pretty hard on helicarriers and has written off a number of the expensive flying fortresses over the years. Since billionaire industrialist/inventor Tony Stark recently became the Director he has worked tirelessly to put his own distinctive stamp on the organisation. Previous helicarriers have been joint efforts, but this one is definitely all Stark’s own work, cheekily featuring a good helping of the streamlined styling and signature red and gold colour scheme made famous by his Iron Man armour.
I couldn’t wait for this beaut new beasty to show up as a collectible so thought I’d have a crack at tooling up my own.
My helicarrier is 16 centimetres long and is made from Super Sculpey, an oven fireable polymer clay. The ‘guns’ are made from 1.5 mm aluminium tube and can be swivelled on their mounts. They can rotate 360 degrees in the vertical plane, which means they can service targets in a range of envelopes from air-to-ground/air and even space. With barrels that size I’m assuming they must be something particularly chunky, maybe some kind of hypervelocity, variable load electromagnetic rail gun, but when Tony Stark is involved who knows? Maybe they’re part of some really humungous sound system that can blast out Black Sabbath on cue, or p’rhaps he’s going to build a couple of giant hands on the ends of the tubes! What they’re probably not is..a bluff! Though Stark’s rep would probably allow him to get away with that too. (Now, that WOULD be irony, man!)
I’ve interpreted the drawing as best I can with only the one admittedly cool drawing to work from.
Helicarriers traditionally loft their own squadrons of aircraft, often from flight decks that look very much like a standard sea borne carrier’s ‘flat top’. S.H.I.E.L.D has had Vertical and Short takeoff and Landing capable aircraft for some time so I reasoned that the flight decks are probably quite abbreviated and accessible by elevators. I’ve detailed the helicarrier with both paint and letraset rub on transfer as well as some very old stick on ‘line’ tape that I’ve had sitting around for decades and which remains handy for jobs like this.
Unless the typical helicarrier outrigger engine pods are meant to be added later the engines must be integral to the hull so I’ve placed six exhaust outlets along the keel to represent them. I mean, this is a Tony Stark invention and I doubt he’d just whack ginormous rotor blades on the thing. Probably some seriously humungous repulsors, I reckon.
For the picture I didn't mess with the model too much. Just dropped it onto a blue screen (okay, a scrap of blue fabric) on the outdoor table, photographed the hell out of it, pulled the ship element out in Photoshop, and dropped it into an Aussie sky plate I shot seperately. Fiddled with the lighting a little, painted some foreground cloud in, and did some general digital housekeeping to clean things up.
I’ve taken the liberty of christening her “Thunder Child” because...well, because I can!
H.G Wells fans will know why, though I dare say that the Thunder God Thor’s mighty brow might be a little puzzled by the name.
Other favourite ‘skyships’ include: Manta Station (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), Spectrum’s Cloudbase (Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons), and U.N.I.T’s Valiant (seen in the Doctor Who episode, The Sound of Drums).
Oh, and the rings painted on the business ends of the guns do NOT denote kills.
Probably.
They're, um, clearance markers so that the helmsman can get a visual check on his proximity to the dock when landing.....
Fair dinkum!
Ahhhhh, Red Hulk, you ruddy maggot. Only went and crashed the bloody thing! On the other hand, what a tax write off Stark's going to get! Wonder who will get the contract to build the new one....$$$$$!!
2015 #4/5 Arkham Knight Batmobile.
Hot Wheels.
HW Batman Series.
Escala 1/64.
Made in Malaysia.
-------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight Batmobile
Debut Series
HW City - Batman
Produced
2015-present
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Batman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it is the successor to the 2013 video game Batman: Arkham Origins, and the fourth main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. Arkham Knight was released worldwide on June 23, 2015."
(...)
Batmobile
"The game introduces the Batmobile as a drivable vehicle. The bulletproof Batmobile can be summoned to the player's location while on foot or, if the player is airborne, summoned to meet Batman as he lands.The vehicle features the ability to perform jumps, speed boosts, rotate on the spot, smash through objects like barricades and trees, and fire missiles that can immobilize enemy vehicles. Batman can eject from the Batmobile and immediately begin gliding around Gotham City."
(...)
"The Batmobile has two modes, which can be switched at any time: Pursuit and Battle.
Pursuit is for moving from area to area and completing specific driving challenges.
In Battle mode, the Batmobile becomes more tank than car, allowing a full 360-degree range of movement, including strafing in any direction, while revealing the multiple weapon systems on board, including a Vulcan chain gun for quick damage, a 60mm hypervelocity cannon for fire support, anti-tank guided missiles for wide-ranging damage against multiple targets, and a non-lethal riot suppressor."
(...)
----------------------------------
Batman: Arkham Knight
Developer(s)
Rocksteady Studios
Publisher(s)
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Director(s)
Sefton Hill
Producer(s)
Daniel Bailie
Nathan Burlow
Designer(s)
Ian Ball
Programmer(s)
Ben Wyatt
Artist(s)
David Hego
Writer(s)
Martin Lancaster
Sefton Hill
Ian Ball
Composer(s)
Nick Arundel
David Buckley
Series
Batman: Arkham
Engine
Unreal Engine 3
Platform(s)
Microsoft Windows
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Release date(s)
WW: June 23, 2015
Genre(s)
Action-adventure
Mode(s)
Single-player
Sources: hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight_Batmobile
In the 21st century, before anything is built, before a spade breaks the earth, a whole series of legal processes must take place to ensure that no one's point of view is not heard.
Our Victorian forebears had no such issues of course, if they saw that something needed to built, then whatever was in its way, it would be torn down so progress could be made.
Not always the best way to do things, but this attitude helped the track millage in Britain increase year on year in the 19th century. And then, with the dawning of the 20th century, no more main lines were built in Britain, until the CTRL.
But back to the matter in hand. Imagine, someone had an idea of defacing that great symbol of Britain, the White Cliffs of Dover, by building a ten metre wide shelf in them and running a railway up them, a railway which would only be open for a decade at most. Clearly there would be public uproar. Will it ever be built?
Well, it was built, the cliffs were scarred, the railway built, used and ripped up. The shelf, The Cliff Road, is still there, leading from under Jubilee Way up round the top of Langdon Hole. It is possible to look at Google Earth and see the trackbed crossing Reach Road, Deal Road before running alongside the Deal to Dover line, the line from the cliffs losing height until at Martin Mill, they had their junction.
Then, during WWII, rail mounted guns were needed to fire across the channel, the track was relaid, and new lines laid in arcs of fire, so the guns could recoil and make aiming easier.
After the way, the track was taken up again, bridges dismantled and mostly forgotten.
Many thanks, then, to my friend Paul Wells for posting shots of these rails, recently uncovered after clearance of mud on an old military road, the only trace, other than The Cliff Road, that remains of the railway.
-----------------------------------------------------------
At the cliff end of Athol Terrace, near Eastern Docks, Dover, a steep footpath leads up the cliff and then along Langdon Cliffs towards St Margaret’s. From the footpath, one can watch the daily activities of Dover’s Eastern Docks and Channel shipping beyond. On clear day, the coast France with the Strait of Dover, like a wide river, in between is quite a site. As one traverses the path, it becomes apparent that it was once a railway track.
The story begins in 1892 when Dover Harbour Board (DHB) accepted the tender of John Jackson (1851-1919) for the building of the Eastern Arm of the new Commercial Harbour - the Prince of Wales Pier. Four years later, in August 1896, the Undercliff Reclamation Act received Royal Assent. The Act was for laying out land on the South Foreland, near St Margaret’s, where a new ‘Dover’ was to be built.
The Parliamentary Bill had been sponsored by Sir William Crundall (1847-1934), thirteen times Mayor of Dover from 1886 to 1910. Crundall owned a construction company that had been founded by his late father, also called William. Both father and son were the prime movers in the development of Dover’s town planning:
- On the west side of the Dour cottages for the working class – Clarendon estate
- On the east side homes for the lower middle class i.e. Barton Road neighbourhood
- Below the Castle and nearer the sea, villas for the upper middle class i.e. the Castle Avenue estate.
The next part of their dream for Dover was to be a private estate on the South Foreland for the well-to-do upper classes.
Crundall had been appointed to DHB in 1886 and twenty years later, in 1906, he was elected Chairman of the Board. He was to hold the office until his death in 1934. Two other businessmen were involved in the proposed South Foreland scheme, Sir John Jackson, who had won the contract for building the Prince of Wales Pier. The third person involved in the South Foreland enterprise was the eminent construction engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray. His company had tendered to build the proposed Admiralty Harbour, which would enclose the whole of Dover bay.
The three men decided that access to the South Foreland site was to be by a road starting from the shore by Castle Jetty, at the east end of Dover’s seafront. It would then run along the base of the cliffs before gently rising to South Foreland at St Margaret’s. To reduce anticipated opposition while the Undercliff Reclamation Bill was going through Parliament, the main purpose given was the prevention of sea erosion at the base of the cliffs. This was substantiated by Sir John Jackson calling an expert witness who proclaimed the necessity. Dover Corporation echoed this and showed that over the previous 25 years the encroachment of the sea had given rise to numerous cliff falls.
It was agreed that in time an Undercliff marine road would be built on the inside of a seawall between Dover and St Margaret’s Bay but not in the foreseeable future. In the immediate future a road if built, they implied, would go over the cliffs. Thus the opposition centred their argument on this saying that if the over-cliff road were to go ahead, it would effectively put public land into private hands. This was dealt with by amendment to the Bill by giving the over-cliff road a lower priority than the Undercliff marine road … either way, the three men got exactly what they wanted!
Before the Bill had received parliamentary approval, excavations began. Initially, the men stated that 500 convicts from the then Langdon prison would be part of the workforce. However, Herbert Asquith, the Home Secretary, refused to comply! For the residents of Athol Terrace, permission for the compulsorily purchase of their front gardens was given and the road we see today was laid at their doorsteps.
The Admiralty Harbour, we see today, was given the go ahead by the government on 5 April 1898 when the contract was signed. Viscount Cowdray’s company (Pearsons) were the main contractors, Sir John Jackson was a subcontractor and Dover Harbour Board, under Sir William Crundall, was actively involved.
To build the Piers and the Breakwater of the new Admiralty Harbour, Pearsons used locally made concrete blocks and faced them with granite. The concrete blocks were made at two blockyards, one on Shakespeare beach in the west and the second on reclaimed land to the east of Castle Jetty, where the Undercliff marine road was proposed to start. To reclaim land the cliff face was blasted and the surplus chalk was removed by steam-navvies – locomotive driven excavators made by Ruston, Proctor & Co, Sheaf Ironworks, Lincoln. Soon a level platform, some 24½ acres (9.915 hectares), was created at the base of the eastern cliffs where the massive blocks were made and stored.
The blocks were made out of sand and shingle brought by ship from Stonar, near Sandwich and unloaded into trucks at the Castle Jetty. From there the trucks were manually pushed along a narrow-gauge track to the blockyard. However, the sea journey was subject to the vagaries of the weather and so it was decided to run a Standard gauge Light Railway line (engines could not go more than 25 miles an hour) from Martin Mill, the nearest station on the South East and Chatham Railway line between Dover and Deal.
The three and a half mile track was pegged out by June 1898. It ran from the Dover side of Martin Mill main line station parallel to the Dover – Deal line for about a mile. Crossing two roads on bridges made of brick abutments with supporting iron girders. Just before the main line Guston Tunnel the Pearson line veered south towards the coast and then along an embankment passing under the Dover-Deal road (A258) near the Swingate Inn. Past Bere Farm, West Cliffe, the line continued south-east crossing the Dover -St Margaret’s Upper Road by a gate. It then turned south-west, following the cliff contours, skirting Langdon Bay. Running west, it followed the edge of Langdon Cliff for about half a mile where metal frames were erected on the cliff edge to stop chalk falling on the works below.
Much of the land that the Pearson railway, as it was called, crossed, was owned by the Cliff Land Company the principal owner of which was Frederick George North, 8th Earl of Guilford (1876–1949) of Waldershare Park. Back in 1844, with the coming of the South Eastern Railway to Dover, the Guilford family had made an application to build 1,500 houses on land to the north of the Castle with an approach road from Castle Jetty. The family still had this dream and the 8th Earl made a deal with Pearsons to charge £25 per year ground rent with the option to buy the standard gauge line, once the lease had expired, for £3,000. It was planned that the Cliff Land Company would use the railway for a passenger service to the development. From Langdon Hole to East Cliff the land was owned by the War Office. They stipulated that the track was to be completed by December 1899. Further, that the Pearson railway was only to be used for carrying materials and the site had to be restored to its original condition.
At the end of the line was a chute down which the materials were fed to the block yard. This quickly proved a problem and was replaced by a funicular, down the cliff face, with side tipping skips to ease unloading. At the bottom, the skips were pushed by hand along a narrow-gauge track built on trestles to the blockyard and emptied into one of six lines of mixers where some 250 blocks were made at once. These were moved by blockyard goliaths – cranes with a span of 100-feet that could lift 50-tons.
The excavations were not without problems. In October 1898, fuses and explosives were taken and deliberately fired at the rear of the sea front East Cliff houses. In September 1899, Albert Knowler was killed during blasting and three months later, a fire in the East Cliff office burnt a man to death. Then, on 19 January 1900, as men were preparing to blast some more of the cliff face there was a massive explosion. Five men, George Jeffries, aged 24, – who later died – James Murton, Ernest Dutton, William Davies and Algenon Gibbs were all injured. In May 1900, labourer Bill Chadwick age-32, was killed by a lump of chalk during blasting at East Cliff.
Neither was the new railway line without controversy, much to the annoyance of the local tourist industry it caused the North Fall Tunnel, a pathway created by the Dover Chamber of Commerce in 1870 to provide a short cut from the beach to the Castle, to be destroyed. In its place, a new path with a steep gradient was excavated up to Broadlees, some distance east of the Castle. This path was expected to be extended in the direction of St Margaret’s Bay and eventually to become the over-cliff road, one of the two options that was envisaged to connected Dover with New Dover – the superlative estate that Crundall, Jackson and Cowdray planned to build at the South Foreland.
The actual building of the Eastern Arm was started in January 1901 and Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson applied for a Light Railway Order to extend the Pearson railway to the South Foreland. A Light Railway order would allow the trains to run on a standard track but at no more than 25 miles an hour, however, this the degree of regulation was less than that applied to main line services and therefore cheaper to set up, run and maintain. The proposal said that the line would run from Athol Terrace, up a 1-in-28 gradient along a 60-foot wide ‘road’ cut into the face of the cliff to Langdon Battery. It would then cross the fields to St Margaret’s to the proposed site of New Dover, before continuing to Martin Mill and joining the main line.
The application stated that it would be a tram/railway service powered by electricity - the local electricity company was then in private ownership and Crundall was the Chairman. There was also the stated intention of extending the line from the Eastern Dockyard, as it became to be called, along Dover’s seafront, Union Street, Strond Street and then to the Harbour station, on the western side of what became the Western Docks. There the proposed line would join the main South East and Chatham Railway line. Another line would go from the existing Deal line at Buckland and then via River to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley.
In April 1902 a public inquiry, headed by the Earl of Jersey, was held into the application. It was agreed that the Company could lay down lines for a light railway in the Borough of Dover, but they could not exercise that power for two years. This was to give time to Dover Corporation, if desirable, to obtain the authority to extend their tramways. Further, on the proposed light railway to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley, this was to terminate at River church and go no further. The application explicitly stated that the tram/railway would be a passenger service, which contravened the agreement with the Earl of Guilford. He immediately sought legal advice and eventually laid out his landholdings on the cliff top as a seaside residential resort.
Crundall, against considerable opposition, in 1907, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
At the western end of the harbour, the Admiralty Pier extension was completed in 1908 and South Eastern Railway Company, with representatives on the Dover Harbour Board, proposed to erect a grand new terminal station at the landward end. Early the following year, Crundall, as Chairman of DHB, invited tenders to widen Admiralty Pier for the possibility of a new railway station. The Lords of the Admiralty visited and discussed the proposals and on 9 December, Pearsons were given the contract.
The Admiralty Harbour was officially opened on the 15 October 1909 by the Prince of Wales, later George V (1910-1936) who unveiled a stone commemorating the event on the Eastern Arm. Two months before, on 9 August, the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company (Light Railway Company) was formed. Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson owned 25 shares each and four others owned one share each. One of these shareholders was Richard Tilden-Smith who later became the main shareholder of Tilmanstone Colliery.
Later that month planning permission was given by Dover Corporation for the utilisation of the Light Railway Company line as a public tramway. The residents of East Cliff objected but their concerns were dismissed by the Corporation and John Bavington Jones, of the Dover Express.
Work started on 21 July 1910 to widen the shore end of the Admiralty Pier for the new railway station comprising of over 11 acres. Chalk for in-filling was taken from East Cliff excavated by the steam-navvy machines. The excavations also created a new road. However, because of the cliffs are so steep when the ‘road’ reached the top it had to be cut in a series of zigzags. This problem was expected to be dealt with later, when the rest of the road was nearing completion.
At the base of East Cliff, railway lines were used to transport the chalk to Castle Jetty where it was loaded onto barges and taken across to Admiralty Pier. In 1910, while the excavations were going on, Channel Collieries Trust was set up to purchase land near South Foreland. Their remit stated that they would build a residential estate, approached by a Cliff Road and the St Margaret’s Light Railway from Dover. The Trust syndicate was composed of … Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson! The road from the excavations was started on 21 July 1910.
The last coping stone on the Admiralty Pier extension was laid by Crundall on 2 April 1913. A month later work started on building the Marine Station, the foundations having been filled in by 1 million cubic yards of chalk from the eastern cliffs.
Two months before, in February 1913, DHB chaired by Crundall, filed a Parliamentary Bill to make changes to the Tidal Basin at the Western Docks. As a supplementary, the Channel Collieries Trust sort consent to replace the western half of the seafront and beach with a 5.75 acre dock and terminus for a Light Railway Company. This went down badly in Dover and a petition was raised followed by a poll that took place on 20 May 1913. Of those eligible to vote, 2,265 voted against the Bill’s Supplement and 1,508 for it. The Supplement was withdrawn.
On 13 April, a closed meeting of the Light Railway Company was held when it was announced that Cowdray and Crundall had sold their shares, by transfer, to the Channel Collieries Trust. The four holders of the single shares in Light Railway Company were not invited to the meeting – the first they heard about it was when they read the national newspapers. A bitter legal battle ensued with Richard Tilden-Smith unsuccessfully trying to seek redress. In the event, Sir John Jackson and two nominees owned the controlling shares in the Light Railway Company.
At the time, the East Kent coalmining industry was taking off. Arthur Burr, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder of several companies with interests in the Kent coalfield, was the leading light. One of these companies was Kent Coal Concessions. Arthur Burr had formed it in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. The intention was lease the coalfields for a share of the royalties. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries.
East Kent Colliery Company also was part of Burr’s portfolio and its holdings included, Shakespeare and Snowdown Collieries. Shakespeare Colliery was sunk in 1896, but had not proved viable and was finally abandoned in December 1915. However, Snowdown, north of Dover, saw the first commercial East Kent coal raised on 19 November 1912. About that time, Burr announced the intention of floating a new company, as a subsidiary of Kent Coal Concessions, to ‘exploit undeveloped areas of East Kent.’
A previous similar floatation had not been a commercial success and the Company Board were not happy. The situation came to a head at a meeting on 31 July 1913 when Burr, along with his son, Dr Malcolm Burr, were ‘retired’ from the Board. The remaining directors consolidated Kent Coal Concessions with allied companies including Kent Collieries Ltd that had extensive mineral rights and had been undertaking mineral exploration. Towards the end of 1913 the giant steel firm, Dorman Long, in which Cowdray was involved, reported that they held 30,000 shares in the Channel Collieries Trust Company, whose holdings included the East Kent Colliery Company, part of the Burr portfolio. Borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. Dorman Long also had interests in Kent Collieries Ltd.
Just prior to World War I (1914-1918), in May 1914, Burr attempted to raise £77,000 in debentures and £800,000 in income bonds for his East Kent Colliery Company. However, little interest was shown and the holdings were handed over to Kent Coal Concessions, by the Official Receiver, with the remit to consolidate. Following consolidation the company held mineral rights under some 20,000 acres of East Kent. In December 1917, Burr was declared bankrupt with debts amounting to £53,176 but he died in September 1919 age 70.
At Dorman Long & Co.’s AGM held in August 1917, it was reported that their investments, through the Channel Collieries Trust Ltd, were a satisfactory £877,304, even though the War had stopped any further excavations. Albeit, with the consent of the Treasury, a fusion of the different East Kent coal interests was agreed with the two chief companies, Kent Collieries Ltd and the Channel Collieries Trust put into voluntary liquidation. Out of this, the Channel Steel Company was formed with a capital of £750,000. It was reported to the assembled shareholders that it was the existence of a large deposit of ironstone in East Kent that had provided the name of the new company.
Sir William Crundall – Chairman of Dover Harbour Board;
Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray – whose company, Pearsons, had successfully tendered to build the Admiralty Harbour,
Sir John Jackson who had been involved in the building the Admiralty Harbour. The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The company had applied, in 1914, for the renewal of their powers to carry coal through the streets of Dover with a view to extending the line from the Western docks to the Eastern Dockyard. The Town Council opposed this, but due to outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), the case was deferred. In order to carry explosives to war-ships berthed in the Camber, at the eastern Dockyard, the War Office decided to build a Sea Front Railway, using the powers that were likely to have been awarded to the Light Railway Company.
Pearson’s successfully tendered and work on what was to become the Sea Front Railway was eventually started in 1918. Single-track and running the length of the promenade from the Prince of Wales Pier to the Eastern Dockyard, the lines that had been used for the Pearson Line and belonging to the Light Railway Company, were taken up and used. It had passing loops and catch points so that trains could run in both directions but soon after the line was laid an accident occurred so a low fence was erected on each side.
Following the death of Sir John Jackson, in December 1919, the Light Railway Company was taken over by the Channel Steel Company. They applied, in 1920, to run a line from the Sea Front Railway at New Bridge, along Camden Crescent, then Liverpool Street (now the rear of the Gateway flats), and following the base of the cliffs to Eastern Dockyard. It was expected that the cliff side residences of East Cliff and Athol Terrace would be demolished.
At the Eastern Dockyard it was envisaged that a railway station would be built and the previously cut road would become a railway track that through a newly constructed tunnel, would join the track of the old Pearsons line. This would then be extended Sea Street, St Margaret’s where another station would be built. The line would then cross the countryside to join the Dover-Deal railway line at Martin Mill.
The new proposal was given outline approval by Dover Corporation with the preference for the construction to be a road not a railway track. This was due to the continuing rise in unemployment in the town – a situation that was prevalent throughout the country at the time – more men could be employed to build a road then a railway. If, however, the company were mindful to create a railway then, the Corporation said, their preference was for the facility to be a tramway, similar to that, which already existed in Dover at the time. Finally, whatever the company decided, colliery trucks could only be used on land purchased by the company and the track could not go through the town.
The Company chose the road option following the route given in the outline proposal. It was to be 50feet (16 metres) wide with a 15-feet (5 metres) wide pavement on each side. The estimated cost was £43,000 and it was expected to provide employment for up to 300 men. The council suggested that Pearsons paid one third, the Corporation a third and it would be expected that the government’s Unemployment Grants Committee would pay the remainder.
In the autumn of 1922, Pearsons joined forces with steel makers Dorman Long, to form Pearson & Dorman Long Company and take over most of the rights from the Kent Coal Concessions. The latter company had been set up by Arthur Burr, the East Kent mining entrepreneur, in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries. Burr’s large portfolio of mining associated companies in East Kent were consolidated in 1913 under the name of Kent Coal Concessions. The giant steel makers, Dorman Long held 30,000 shares in the consolidated company as borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. In 1917, a partial consolidation had created the Channel Steel Company and included Snowdown Colliery. Although Kent Coal Concessions did retain some mineral rights, due to the economic depression no one was interested in leasing them and in 1925, the company folded.
Having amalgamated the newly styled Pearson Dorman Long company immediately started the preliminary work on what resulted in Betteshanger Colliery. However, as they did not own the surface land they were unable to sink the pit. Albeit, through the subsidiary, Channel Steel Company, they proposed building a steel works between Dover and St Margaret’s adjacent to the proposed new road and Dover Corporation gave their approval.
The council applied to the Unemployment Grants Committee stating that the cost for the new road was £56,000. The Committee asked for the plans to be modified and suggested that the Ministry of Transport and Kent County Council (KCC) should contribute towards the costs. While these applications were being made the road was put on hold. During the winter of 1923-24, the revised estimate had increased to £129,000 but government financing was not forthcoming.
On 29 September 1923, the Admiralty formerly handed the port over to the Dover Harbour Board (DHB), still headed by Sir William Crundall. This included the Sea Front Railway line but the Eastern Dockyard was retained by the Admiralty and let on lease to Stanlee Ship-breaking Company. The Camber was retained for Admiralty purposes.
During spring and summer of 1924, Dover’s Mayor, Richard Barwick, and the Town Clerk, Reginald Knocker, visited various government departments laying before them the urgent need for unemployment relief. The Ministry of Transport relented and sanctioned the borrowing of £45,000. In the autumn of 1924 sites near Kingsdown were put on the market through Protheroe and Morris of Cheapside, London. Channel Collieries Trust held the mineral rights under the property and the sites were bought by Pearson Dorman Long – at last, they could sink Betteshanger Colliery.
Unemployment continued to rise and in 1925 DHB applied to Parliament to close Dover harbour’s Western entrance. They wanted to run a railway line along the Southern Breakwater to load Kent coal onto ships for export from there. However, the disparity in exchange rates between the UK and the Continent meant that the country was importing coal and the application came under a lot of criticism.
On the subject of Exchange Rate parity and the negative effect it was having on British industry, Sir Arthur Dorman made a powerful and well reported speech (Economist 19.12.1925). He begged the government for equal parity in the exchange rates but the response was: ‘a strong £ was the sign of a strong country.‘ Pearson Dorman Long wrote to the council saying that they could no longer afford to contribute to the cost of the road.
Cheap imports of coal continued to affect the domestic industry but in February 1926, the government did give a grant of £2m to the Kent coalfields. However, at midnight on 3 May saw the beginning of the General Strike. In October, that year, the council finally heard from the Unemployment Grants Committee through a letter sent to the town’s Member of Parliament (1922 -1945), Major the Hon. John Jacob Astor. The Committee had declined to provide a grant for the East Cliff Road, the reason given was that ‘unemployment in Dover was not sufficiently exceptional to warrant relief.’ It was generally felt that the refusal was retaliatory because East Kent miners had joined the national strike.
Richard Tilden Smith, who had been involved in a bitter legal action against the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company in 1913, bought Tilmanstone Colliery from the Official Receiver in November 1926. At the same time an application was made by Tilmanstone (Kent) Collieries Ltd for the right to carry an aerial ropeway for a distance of 6½ miles (this was stated in the original application) from their colliery. This was to include a tunnel being cut through the cliffs to the Eastern Dockyard. The proposed course extended over land owned by 18 different personages one of which was Southern Railway. Although permission was granted, Southern Railway, and the Pearson, Dorman Long’s Channel Steel Company appealed but this was overturned and works started.
In 1927 Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, died. Under the 1896 terms of agreement between the War Department and Pearsons, the line from East Cliff to Langdon Hole had to be restored to its original condition. In May 1929, the War Department took legal action forcing Channel Steel Company to pay £1,300 compensation for the breach of covenant. The next month, the same Department sold the land to … the Channel Steel Company!
At the same time, Tilden Smith leased 24 acres of land at Langdon Hole from the War Department for cement works that would utilise chalk from Dover’s white cliffs. He also planned steel and brick works nearby – that was to be part of his plan for East Kent to become the New Industrial Eden. While on 17 March 1927, Southern Railway sought permission to carry coal on the Sea Front Railway and along the Eastern Arm of the Eastern Dockyard to specially built giant bunkers.
Tilden Smith’s, now 7½ mile, aerial ropeway from Tilmanstone colliery to the Eastern Arm was formerly opened on 14 February 1930. The ceremony was simple as Tilden Smith had died suddenly in the House of Commons on 18 December 1929. The tunnels, through which the ropeway ran to the Eastern Arm, can still be seen.
Bunkers were built but in August 1928 a huge coal staithe to be installed at the end of Eastern Arm, was commissioned by Southern Railway. It was built of ferro-concrete by the Yorkshire Hennebique Construction Company and held 5000-tons of coal. The Staithe was fitted with electronic discharging mechanism that enabled a vessel to be loaded with 500 tons of coal an hour and cost £22,000.
DHB withdrew its proposal to close the Western entrance and focused on increasing the number of coal sidings at the Eastern Dockyard. It was clear that this was to enable the export of coal from Pearson Dorman Long’s Snowdown and Betteshanger collieries. The electronic coal staithe officially started operating on 19 April 1932. The first ship was Dover’s steamer Kenneth Hawksfield, which was loaded with 2,450 tons coal from Snowdown Colliery.
Although it was suggested that a rail link would be built through a tunnel from the Eastern Arm to join the Deal railway line at Kearsney, until such time the Sea Front railway was to be used. It was anticipated that the railway would be in use 14-hours a day and would carry 800,000tons of coal a year together with scrap iron and oil for refuelling ships. The coal was transported on the Sea Front Railway.
The first train from Snowdown Colliery at 09.00 and in the next 23-hours, 18 trainloads of coal was carried on the Sea Front Railway line choking its whole course with dust. 17,000 Dovorians signed a petition that was sent to the House of Lords. Parliament restricted the use of the Railway to carrying a maximum of 500,000 tons of coal a year and only during day light. In 1933, Parliament approved a DHB Bill for a 1.75-mile railway line from the Kearsney junction, on the Deal line, through a tunnel to the Eastern dockyard. Although this would have obviated the need of the Sea Front Railway to carry coal, with the death of Sir William Crundall, the Chairman of DHB, in 1934, the scheme was abandoned as too expensive.
On 1 April 1934, Dover Borough municipal boundaries were extended bringing in to the Borough, Eastern Dockyard and Arm but the cliffs overlooking the area remained part of the Rural District. That same year, the council resurrected the idea of finishing the Cliff Road to St Margaret’s utilising the earlier Light Railway Company’s permit. This had been renewed every year and was given added impetus in 1937 when, due to war preparations and the shortage of scrap iron, the remaining track of what had once been the Pearsons line was lifted.
Following the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), the War Office instigated the building of the Martin Mill Military Railway, operated and manned by the Royal Engineers and using diesel locomotives. The line followed the original Pearsons route from Martin Mill to a point called RDF Junction, about 900 feet ( 275 metres) past the then Dover-Deal road bridge. Here it divided, with the ‘main line’ turning north-east to service the guns, Winnie and Pooh. Passing beneath Winnie’s gun barrel it crossed the St Margaret’s – Martin Mill Road to Pooh’s position.
A second line, from the RDF Junction, went straight ahead for about half a mile, then in a north-east direction for another half a mile. This served the Wanstone and South Foreland Batteries. The battery close to the Dover Patrol Memorial, Point at Leathercote Point, was served by a branch line from Decoy Junction – this was named after a dummy Winnie, on the ‘main line’.
Winnie and Pooh were two 14-inch ex-naval guns manned by the Royal Marines and were capable of firing their missiles across the 21-mile wide Dover Strait to France. Winnie was installed during the Battle of Britain, in 1940 on St Margaret’s golf links and was soon after joined by Pooh, located along the Kingsdown Road.
In August 1942 Jane and Clem, two 15-inch guns, came into operation overlooking Fan Bay Battery, an emergency battery with three six-inch guns. Jane was originally designed for HMS Repulse and named after a Daily Mirror cartoon character. Clem was said to be named after the Labour leader Clement Attlee (1883-1967) or Winston Churchill’s (1874-1965) wife Clementine (1885-1977)! These were wire wound guns made of a composite of steel and steel wire. The construction was introduced in the 1890’s to deal with the increased pressures in the barrel caused by the use of the then new propellant – cordite. Radar was installed and linked with the guns that proved successful.
There were also three 13.5-inch calibre railway guns manned by Royal Marines and called Gladiator, Piecemaker and Sceneshifter. During periods of inaction, these guns were normally hidden in the Guston tunnel but sometimes in tunnels at Shepherdswell and Martin Mill.
The Battery at South Foreland was equipped with four 9.2-inch guns, while near the Dover Patrol Memorial was the Bruce gun. An experimental, hypervelocity gun built by Vickers and weighing 86-tons. The barrel was 60 feet long and could fire a shell weighing 256lbs over a distance of 100,000 yards – 57-miles. However, it was never fired in anger due to the enormous pressure affecting the shell fuses causing some to explode prematurely in mid-flight. All the real guns were hidden under camouflage netting, while dummy ones were partially concealed on the cliff top site, which accounts for the reason why the cliff top is pitted with craters.
By late 1944, the operational use of the Martin Mill Military Railway was declining, only being used to move stores and equipment. Following the end of hostilities, the Light Railway Company resumed management and some of the track was sold for export to Tanganyika as part of the ill-fated Groundnut Scheme (1947-1951). However, beyond that and seeking repeated extensions, nothing else happened and in 1952, the company officially ceased trading.
By that time, the route across the cliffs had become a favourite walk but in the spring of 1954, due to the Cold War, the military began erecting a 5-foot chestnut fence on either side of what had been the 6-foot wide track. Vigorous protests were made and the military agreed to remove the fence from the seaward side except where it enclosed military installations. Three years later the Big Guns – Jane, Clem, Winnie and Pooh were dismantled and uprooted from their reinforced concrete emplacements. The smaller guns were also removed.
About 200 acres of land, which had been commandeered by the military between Dover and St Margaret’s, was de-requisitioned following the stand-down of Coastal Artillery in 1956. Much of the remaining railway track was lifted although the rails and bridges at the Martin Mill end were still in situ in 1960. At that time, the Ministry of Transport was considering using the track for a motorway approach to Eastern Docks.
Finally, during the post-war period, Marine Parade was widened and the Sea Front Railway safety fence was removed. In order to tell tourists to remove their parked cars off the track, a man with a red flag walked in front of the trains! Robert Eade, Dover’s Mayor in 1961, was one. By that time freight traffic, using the service was declining and the last train – a diesel locomotive pulling three wagons, ran on the 31 December 1964. The lines were eventually covered with tarmac.
doverhistorian.com/2013/11/07/dover-st-margarets-and-mart...
hvs10: Image of hypervelocity star shown in red on the galaxy views.
(Sloan Digital Sky Survey) news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/01/hypervelocity-stars/
F-70A is an autonomous¹ hypersonic VTOL 7GF operating in AD environment beyond the 2050 timeframe, equipped with NG EA, ISP, ADSs, PQR detection, Li-Fi, DEW and enhanced capabilities in areas such as reach, persistence, survivability, net-centricity, SA, cyberattack, HSI, WEs. Cfr. notes² over the above image.
Total operational aircraft quantity: 100
Total program cost (2020-2050): US$200 billion
Unit flyaway cost: US$700 million
NOTES
1. The F-70A is also an Optionally Piloted Aerial Vehicle (OPAV).
2. Scale ≅ 1:17.693; 1 m = 214√p; 1√p = 1/96" ≅ 4.68E-3 m;
OALₛ = 4,715√p ≅ 1.248 mₛ; WSₛ = 2,145√p ≅ 5.675E-1 mₛ.
Crew: 2 · OAL/WS/OAH 22.0726/16.0528/4.8514 m · WA 92.903 m² · E/L/MTO M 13,608/27,488/29,484 Kg · ELC 13,608 Kg · IFC 15,876 Kg · 2× 445 KN GE/PW F250 + 1× 80 KN RR LS1 STOVL · TVC ±15° @40°/s P/Y · NE/C S @SC M10.0/5.0 · SC 3E4 m · CR 2.5E6 m · WL 550 Kg/m² · 1× AN/APG90 QAESA + 1× AN/AAQ40 DAS-MWS/EOTS/SATP/SAIRST + 1× AN/ASQ239 EWS + 1× MADLCS + 2× HMDS · 1× 2,000-rds 20 mm GAU22A + 2×8 IRLAS + 2×2 IFS + 4× EWPS
Rockwell-Lockheed A/FX 1992 concept, initially non hypersonic, significantly influenced the forthcoming F-70's design and style.
REFERENCES
R. Avella 2025: Boeing F-47 6GF concept.
D.A. Vincenzi & al. 2024: Human factors in simulation & training.
M. Ghafarian & al. 2023: Dynamic Vehicular Motion Simulators.
X. Li & al. 2023: Flying-wing wing rock mode.
H.P. Williams & al. 2021: ETC Kraken GL6000 @ ±3g₀.
J. Van Welbergen 2020: Thales FCAS 2035 avionics.
R.L. Laurent Jr. 2020: ETC ATFS-400-31 @ ±20g₀.
P.G.A. Cizmas 2020: Aerothermodynamics & jet propulsion.
A.R. Jha 2017: UAV theory, design & apps.
J. Park & al. 2016: Tailless aircraft control surface design optimization.
E.H. Hirschel 2015: Aerothermodynamics.
Y. Gordon & S. Komissarov 2013: Unflown wings, p. 523.
E.H. Hirschel & C. Weiland 2009: HFV aerothermodynamics.
T.A. Heppenheimer 2002: History of the Space Shuttle.
J.J. Bertin 1994: Hypersonic aerothermodynamics.
W.T. Gunston 1992: Faster than sound, pp. 228-266.
A.J. Eggers Jr. 1957: LR hypervelocity vehicles.
A.J. Eggers Jr. & al. 1957: LR hypervelocity vehicles.
ÆHSA · B21 · X30 · FBWL · FS · ITE · NEAT · NESI · MSTC · AIM260 · CHAMP · LREW · MSDM · SCIFiRE · AS24 · R37M · HTK · ABL · ec
It’s very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy.
In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core.
So far astronomers have found 16 of these “hypervelocity” stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still inside the galaxy.
Now, Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core. They selected these stars based on their location in intergalactic space between the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy and by their peculiar red coloration.
Read more: vanderbi.lt/4b8qa
Vanderbilt astronomers Kelly Holley-Bockelmann and Lauren Palladino standing in front of a NASA illustration of a supermassive black hole. (Jenni Ohnstad, John Russell / Vanderbilt, NASA)
This is the Hypervelocity Armor version of Iron Man from the Iron Man 2 Concept Series. You can see more of him here: www.flickr.com/photos/otakusphere/4512366775/in/set-72157...
Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research, shows off a Hypervelocity Projectile (HVP) to CBS News reporter David Martin, during an interview held at the Naval Research Laboratory's materials testing facility. The HVP is a next-generation, common, low drag, guided projectile capable of completing multiple missions for gun systems such as the Navy 5-Inch, 155-mm, and future railguns. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released)
Mrs. Schnetzler greets Peirs Sellers of STS-132...NASA Astronaut Piers Sellers will honor former Goddard scientist, the late Charlie Schnetzler, by presenting his wife and family with the Australasian tektites collected by her husband during his search for the source crater and flown in orbit by Astronaut Sellers. . .Tektites are pieces of melted rock blasted into space by hypervelocity impact events, such as those made when near earth objects (NEO’s) collide with Earth. These objects return to the Earth’s surface as recondensed rock “glass.”. .This event is symbolic of the great scientific impact Mr. Schnetzler had on Earth, planetary sciences, and the importance of continued human spaceflight. ..NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
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Join us on Facebook..Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Debbie Mccallum
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly called Star Wars after one of the popular science fantasy movies of the time, was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Though it was never fully developed or deployed, the research and technologies of SDI paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; from global to regional coverage. BMDO was later renamed to the Missile Defense Agency. This article covers defense efforts under the SDIO.
In 1984, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established to oversee the program, which was headed by Lt. General James Alan Abrahamson, USAF, a past Director of the NASA Space Shuttle program. Research and development initiated by the SDIO created significant technological advances in computer systems, component miniaturization, sensors and missile systems that form the basis for current systems.
Initially, the program focused on large scale systems designed to defeat a Soviet offensive strike. However, as the threat diminished, the program shifted towards smaller systems designed to defeat limited or accidental launches.
By 1987, the SDIO developed a national missile defense concept called the Strategic Defense System Phase I Architecture. This concept consisted of ground and space based sensors and weapons, as well as a central battle management system. The ground-based systems operational today trace their roots back to this concept.
In his 1991 State of the Union Address George H. W. Bush shifted the focus of SDI from defense of North America against large scale strikes to a system focusing on theater missile defense called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS).
In 1993, the Clinton administration, further shifted the focus to ground-based interceptor missiles and theater scale systems, forming the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and closing the SDIO. Ballistic missile defense has been revived by the George W. Bush administration as the National Missile Defense and Ground-based Midcourse Defense.
www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0846897.html
encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761568978/Strategic_Defense_...
www.britannica.com/eb/article-9069901/Strategic-Defense-I...
www.answers.com/topic/strategic-defense-initiative
We saw no blue birds.
Yes, the White Cliffs of Dover, so revered they built a railway line down them to bring materials down when they built the eastern harbour arm, then abandoned the line.
That is the flat area to the left, what is left of an inclined plane from the top of Langdon Hole where a line went across the fields to join the main line at Martin Mill.
After the harbour was built, a tramway was to be built to serve a newtown to be built along the cliffs, but thankfully that plan never came to fruition, though I have seen the plans for terraced house all along our streets and the others up Station Road, and stretching halfway along to Ringwould.
I have no idea where those who would have lived in this new town would have worked.
Anyway, in the end money ran out and the war came.
We were here at seven in the morning looking for orchids before we went to Tesco.
Was bracing, but glorious, and well worth being out so early, and with no other people about too.
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In the 21st century, before anything is built, before a spade breaks the earth, a whole series of legal processes must take place to ensure that no one's point of view is not heard.
Our Victorian forebears had no such issues of course, if they saw that something needed to built, then whatever was in its way, it would be torn down so progress could be made.
Not always the best way to do things, but this attitude helped the track millage in Britain increase year on year in the 19th century. And then, with the dawning of the 20th century, no more main lines were built in Britain, until the CTRL.
But back to the matter in hand. Imagine, someone had an idea of defacing that great symbol of Britain, the White Cliffs of Dover, by building a ten metre wide shelf in them and running a railway up them, a railway which would only be open for a decade at most. Clearly there would be public uproar. Will it ever be built?
Well, it was built, the cliffs were scarred, the railway built, used and ripped up. The shelf, The Cliff Road, is still there, leading from under Jubilee Way up round the top of Langdon Hole. It is possible to look at Google Earth and see the trackbed crossing Reach Road, Deal Road before running alongside the Deal to Dover line, the line from the cliffs losing height until at Martin Mill, they had their junction.
Then, during WWII, rail mounted guns were needed to fire across the channel, the track was relaid, and new lines laid in arcs of fire, so the guns could recoil and make aiming easier.
After the way, the track was taken up again, bridges dismantled and mostly forgotten.
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At the cliff end of Athol Terrace, near Eastern Docks, Dover, a steep footpath leads up the cliff and then along Langdon Cliffs towards St Margaret’s. From the footpath, one can watch the daily activities of Dover’s Eastern Docks and Channel shipping beyond. On clear day, the coast France with the Strait of Dover, like a wide river, in between is quite a site. As one traverses the path, it becomes apparent that it was once a railway track.
The story begins in 1892 when Dover Harbour Board (DHB) accepted the tender of John Jackson (1851-1919) for the building of the Eastern Arm of the new Commercial Harbour - the Prince of Wales Pier. Four years later, in August 1896, the Undercliff Reclamation Act received Royal Assent. The Act was for laying out land on the South Foreland, near St Margaret’s, where a new ‘Dover’ was to be built.
The Parliamentary Bill had been sponsored by Sir William Crundall (1847-1934), thirteen times Mayor of Dover from 1886 to 1910. Crundall owned a construction company that had been founded by his late father, also called William. Both father and son were the prime movers in the development of Dover’s town planning:
- On the west side of the Dour cottages for the working class – Clarendon estate
- On the east side homes for the lower middle class i.e. Barton Road neighbourhood
- Below the Castle and nearer the sea, villas for the upper middle class i.e. the Castle Avenue estate.
The next part of their dream for Dover was to be a private estate on the South Foreland for the well-to-do upper classes.
Crundall had been appointed to DHB in 1886 and twenty years later, in 1906, he was elected Chairman of the Board. He was to hold the office until his death in 1934. Two other businessmen were involved in the proposed South Foreland scheme, Sir John Jackson, who had won the contract for building the Prince of Wales Pier. The third person involved in the South Foreland enterprise was the eminent construction engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray. His company had tendered to build the proposed Admiralty Harbour, which would enclose the whole of Dover bay.
The three men decided that access to the South Foreland site was to be by a road starting from the shore by Castle Jetty, at the east end of Dover’s seafront. It would then run along the base of the cliffs before gently rising to South Foreland at St Margaret’s. To reduce anticipated opposition while the Undercliff Reclamation Bill was going through Parliament, the main purpose given was the prevention of sea erosion at the base of the cliffs. This was substantiated by Sir John Jackson calling an expert witness who proclaimed the necessity. Dover Corporation echoed this and showed that over the previous 25 years the encroachment of the sea had given rise to numerous cliff falls.
It was agreed that in time an Undercliff marine road would be built on the inside of a seawall between Dover and St Margaret’s Bay but not in the foreseeable future. In the immediate future a road if built, they implied, would go over the cliffs. Thus the opposition centred their argument on this saying that if the over-cliff road were to go ahead, it would effectively put public land into private hands. This was dealt with by amendment to the Bill by giving the over-cliff road a lower priority than the Undercliff marine road … either way, the three men got exactly what they wanted!
Before the Bill had received parliamentary approval, excavations began. Initially, the men stated that 500 convicts from the then Langdon prison would be part of the workforce. However, Herbert Asquith, the Home Secretary, refused to comply! For the residents of Athol Terrace, permission for the compulsorily purchase of their front gardens was given and the road we see today was laid at their doorsteps.
The Admiralty Harbour, we see today, was given the go ahead by the government on 5 April 1898 when the contract was signed. Viscount Cowdray’s company (Pearsons) were the main contractors, Sir John Jackson was a subcontractor and Dover Harbour Board, under Sir William Crundall, was actively involved.
To build the Piers and the Breakwater of the new Admiralty Harbour, Pearsons used locally made concrete blocks and faced them with granite. The concrete blocks were made at two blockyards, one on Shakespeare beach in the west and the second on reclaimed land to the east of Castle Jetty, where the Undercliff marine road was proposed to start. To reclaim land the cliff face was blasted and the surplus chalk was removed by steam-navvies – locomotive driven excavators made by Ruston, Proctor & Co, Sheaf Ironworks, Lincoln. Soon a level platform, some 24½ acres (9.915 hectares), was created at the base of the eastern cliffs where the massive blocks were made and stored.
The blocks were made out of sand and shingle brought by ship from Stonar, near Sandwich and unloaded into trucks at the Castle Jetty. From there the trucks were manually pushed along a narrow-gauge track to the blockyard. However, the sea journey was subject to the vagaries of the weather and so it was decided to run a Standard gauge Light Railway line (engines could not go more than 25 miles an hour) from Martin Mill, the nearest station on the South East and Chatham Railway line between Dover and Deal.
The three and a half mile track was pegged out by June 1898. It ran from the Dover side of Martin Mill main line station parallel to the Dover – Deal line for about a mile. Crossing two roads on bridges made of brick abutments with supporting iron girders. Just before the main line Guston Tunnel the Pearson line veered south towards the coast and then along an embankment passing under the Dover-Deal road (A258) near the Swingate Inn. Past Bere Farm, West Cliffe, the line continued south-east crossing the Dover -St Margaret’s Upper Road by a gate. It then turned south-west, following the cliff contours, skirting Langdon Bay. Running west, it followed the edge of Langdon Cliff for about half a mile where metal frames were erected on the cliff edge to stop chalk falling on the works below.
Much of the land that the Pearson railway, as it was called, crossed, was owned by the Cliff Land Company the principal owner of which was Frederick George North, 8th Earl of Guilford (1876–1949) of Waldershare Park. Back in 1844, with the coming of the South Eastern Railway to Dover, the Guilford family had made an application to build 1,500 houses on land to the north of the Castle with an approach road from Castle Jetty. The family still had this dream and the 8th Earl made a deal with Pearsons to charge £25 per year ground rent with the option to buy the standard gauge line, once the lease had expired, for £3,000. It was planned that the Cliff Land Company would use the railway for a passenger service to the development. From Langdon Hole to East Cliff the land was owned by the War Office. They stipulated that the track was to be completed by December 1899. Further, that the Pearson railway was only to be used for carrying materials and the site had to be restored to its original condition.
At the end of the line was a chute down which the materials were fed to the block yard. This quickly proved a problem and was replaced by a funicular, down the cliff face, with side tipping skips to ease unloading. At the bottom, the skips were pushed by hand along a narrow-gauge track built on trestles to the blockyard and emptied into one of six lines of mixers where some 250 blocks were made at once. These were moved by blockyard goliaths – cranes with a span of 100-feet that could lift 50-tons.
The excavations were not without problems. In October 1898, fuses and explosives were taken and deliberately fired at the rear of the sea front East Cliff houses. In September 1899, Albert Knowler was killed during blasting and three months later, a fire in the East Cliff office burnt a man to death. Then, on 19 January 1900, as men were preparing to blast some more of the cliff face there was a massive explosion. Five men, George Jeffries, aged 24, – who later died – James Murton, Ernest Dutton, William Davies and Algenon Gibbs were all injured. In May 1900, labourer Bill Chadwick age-32, was killed by a lump of chalk during blasting at East Cliff.
Neither was the new railway line without controversy, much to the annoyance of the local tourist industry it caused the North Fall Tunnel, a pathway created by the Dover Chamber of Commerce in 1870 to provide a short cut from the beach to the Castle, to be destroyed. In its place, a new path with a steep gradient was excavated up to Broadlees, some distance east of the Castle. This path was expected to be extended in the direction of St Margaret’s Bay and eventually to become the over-cliff road, one of the two options that was envisaged to connected Dover with New Dover – the superlative estate that Crundall, Jackson and Cowdray planned to build at the South Foreland.
The actual building of the Eastern Arm was started in January 1901 and Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson applied for a Light Railway Order to extend the Pearson railway to the South Foreland. A Light Railway order would allow the trains to run on a standard track but at no more than 25 miles an hour, however, this the degree of regulation was less than that applied to main line services and therefore cheaper to set up, run and maintain. The proposal said that the line would run from Athol Terrace, up a 1-in-28 gradient along a 60-foot wide ‘road’ cut into the face of the cliff to Langdon Battery. It would then cross the fields to St Margaret’s to the proposed site of New Dover, before continuing to Martin Mill and joining the main line.
The application stated that it would be a tram/railway service powered by electricity - the local electricity company was then in private ownership and Crundall was the Chairman. There was also the stated intention of extending the line from the Eastern Dockyard, as it became to be called, along Dover’s seafront, Union Street, Strond Street and then to the Harbour station, on the western side of what became the Western Docks. There the proposed line would join the main South East and Chatham Railway line. Another line would go from the existing Deal line at Buckland and then via River to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley.
In April 1902 a public inquiry, headed by the Earl of Jersey, was held into the application. It was agreed that the Company could lay down lines for a light railway in the Borough of Dover, but they could not exercise that power for two years. This was to give time to Dover Corporation, if desirable, to obtain the authority to extend their tramways. Further, on the proposed light railway to Bushy Ruff in the Alkham Valley, this was to terminate at River church and go no further. The application explicitly stated that the tram/railway would be a passenger service, which contravened the agreement with the Earl of Guilford. He immediately sought legal advice and eventually laid out his landholdings on the cliff top as a seaside residential resort.
Crundall, against considerable opposition, in 1907, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
, gained permission to develop the area around the South Foreland. This would, claimed the local paper, Dover Express, turn the acres east of Dover into a ‘land flowing with milk and honey, with many noble marine residences.‘ In the meantime, the land from Bere Farm to Langdon Hole, owned by the Earl of Guilford and designated as a seaside residential resort, was taken over by the War Office.
At the western end of the harbour, the Admiralty Pier extension was completed in 1908 and South Eastern Railway Company, with representatives on the Dover Harbour Board, proposed to erect a grand new terminal station at the landward end. Early the following year, Crundall, as Chairman of DHB, invited tenders to widen Admiralty Pier for the possibility of a new railway station. The Lords of the Admiralty visited and discussed the proposals and on 9 December, Pearsons were given the contract.
The Admiralty Harbour was officially opened on the 15 October 1909 by the Prince of Wales, later George V (1910-1936) who unveiled a stone commemorating the event on the Eastern Arm. Two months before, on 9 August, the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company (Light Railway Company) was formed. Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson owned 25 shares each and four others owned one share each. One of these shareholders was Richard Tilden-Smith who later became the main shareholder of Tilmanstone Colliery.
Later that month planning permission was given by Dover Corporation for the utilisation of the Light Railway Company line as a public tramway. The residents of East Cliff objected but their concerns were dismissed by the Corporation and John Bavington Jones, of the Dover Express.
Work started on 21 July 1910 to widen the shore end of the Admiralty Pier for the new railway station comprising of over 11 acres. Chalk for in-filling was taken from East Cliff excavated by the steam-navvy machines. The excavations also created a new road. However, because of the cliffs are so steep when the ‘road’ reached the top it had to be cut in a series of zigzags. This problem was expected to be dealt with later, when the rest of the road was nearing completion.
At the base of East Cliff, railway lines were used to transport the chalk to Castle Jetty where it was loaded onto barges and taken across to Admiralty Pier. In 1910, while the excavations were going on, Channel Collieries Trust was set up to purchase land near South Foreland. Their remit stated that they would build a residential estate, approached by a Cliff Road and the St Margaret’s Light Railway from Dover. The Trust syndicate was composed of … Crundall, Cowdray and Jackson! The road from the excavations was started on 21 July 1910.
The last coping stone on the Admiralty Pier extension was laid by Crundall on 2 April 1913. A month later work started on building the Marine Station, the foundations having been filled in by 1 million cubic yards of chalk from the eastern cliffs.
Two months before, in February 1913, DHB chaired by Crundall, filed a Parliamentary Bill to make changes to the Tidal Basin at the Western Docks. As a supplementary, the Channel Collieries Trust sort consent to replace the western half of the seafront and beach with a 5.75 acre dock and terminus for a Light Railway Company. This went down badly in Dover and a petition was raised followed by a poll that took place on 20 May 1913. Of those eligible to vote, 2,265 voted against the Bill’s Supplement and 1,508 for it. The Supplement was withdrawn.
On 13 April, a closed meeting of the Light Railway Company was held when it was announced that Cowdray and Crundall had sold their shares, by transfer, to the Channel Collieries Trust. The four holders of the single shares in Light Railway Company were not invited to the meeting – the first they heard about it was when they read the national newspapers. A bitter legal battle ensued with Richard Tilden-Smith unsuccessfully trying to seek redress. In the event, Sir John Jackson and two nominees owned the controlling shares in the Light Railway Company.
At the time, the East Kent coalmining industry was taking off. Arthur Burr, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder of several companies with interests in the Kent coalfield, was the leading light. One of these companies was Kent Coal Concessions. Arthur Burr had formed it in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. The intention was lease the coalfields for a share of the royalties. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries.
East Kent Colliery Company also was part of Burr’s portfolio and its holdings included, Shakespeare and Snowdown Collieries. Shakespeare Colliery was sunk in 1896, but had not proved viable and was finally abandoned in December 1915. However, Snowdown, north of Dover, saw the first commercial East Kent coal raised on 19 November 1912. About that time, Burr announced the intention of floating a new company, as a subsidiary of Kent Coal Concessions, to ‘exploit undeveloped areas of East Kent.’
A previous similar floatation had not been a commercial success and the Company Board were not happy. The situation came to a head at a meeting on 31 July 1913 when Burr, along with his son, Dr Malcolm Burr, were ‘retired’ from the Board. The remaining directors consolidated Kent Coal Concessions with allied companies including Kent Collieries Ltd that had extensive mineral rights and had been undertaking mineral exploration. Towards the end of 1913 the giant steel firm, Dorman Long, in which Cowdray was involved, reported that they held 30,000 shares in the Channel Collieries Trust Company, whose holdings included the East Kent Colliery Company, part of the Burr portfolio. Borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. Dorman Long also had interests in Kent Collieries Ltd.
Just prior to World War I (1914-1918), in May 1914, Burr attempted to raise £77,000 in debentures and £800,000 in income bonds for his East Kent Colliery Company. However, little interest was shown and the holdings were handed over to Kent Coal Concessions, by the Official Receiver, with the remit to consolidate. Following consolidation the company held mineral rights under some 20,000 acres of East Kent. In December 1917, Burr was declared bankrupt with debts amounting to £53,176 but he died in September 1919 age 70.
At Dorman Long & Co.’s AGM held in August 1917, it was reported that their investments, through the Channel Collieries Trust Ltd, were a satisfactory £877,304, even though the War had stopped any further excavations. Albeit, with the consent of the Treasury, a fusion of the different East Kent coal interests was agreed with the two chief companies, Kent Collieries Ltd and the Channel Collieries Trust put into voluntary liquidation. Out of this, the Channel Steel Company was formed with a capital of £750,000. It was reported to the assembled shareholders that it was the existence of a large deposit of ironstone in East Kent that had provided the name of the new company.
Sir William Crundall – Chairman of Dover Harbour Board;
Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray – whose company, Pearsons, had successfully tendered to build the Admiralty Harbour,
Sir John Jackson who had been involved in the building the Admiralty Harbour. The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The railway line was generally known as the Pearson Line.
The company had applied, in 1914, for the renewal of their powers to carry coal through the streets of Dover with a view to extending the line from the Western docks to the Eastern Dockyard. The Town Council opposed this, but due to outbreak of World War I (1914-1918), the case was deferred. In order to carry explosives to war-ships berthed in the Camber, at the eastern Dockyard, the War Office decided to build a Sea Front Railway, using the powers that were likely to have been awarded to the Light Railway Company.
Pearson’s successfully tendered and work on what was to become the Sea Front Railway was eventually started in 1918. Single-track and running the length of the promenade from the Prince of Wales Pier to the Eastern Dockyard, the lines that had been used for the Pearson Line and belonging to the Light Railway Company, were taken up and used. It had passing loops and catch points so that trains could run in both directions but soon after the line was laid an accident occurred so a low fence was erected on each side.
Following the death of Sir John Jackson, in December 1919, the Light Railway Company was taken over by the Channel Steel Company. They applied, in 1920, to run a line from the Sea Front Railway at New Bridge, along Camden Crescent, then Liverpool Street (now the rear of the Gateway flats), and following the base of the cliffs to Eastern Dockyard. It was expected that the cliff side residences of East Cliff and Athol Terrace would be demolished.
At the Eastern Dockyard it was envisaged that a railway station would be built and the previously cut road would become a railway track that through a newly constructed tunnel, would join the track of the old Pearsons line. This would then be extended Sea Street, St Margaret’s where another station would be built. The line would then cross the countryside to join the Dover-Deal railway line at Martin Mill.
The new proposal was given outline approval by Dover Corporation with the preference for the construction to be a road not a railway track. This was due to the continuing rise in unemployment in the town – a situation that was prevalent throughout the country at the time – more men could be employed to build a road then a railway. If, however, the company were mindful to create a railway then, the Corporation said, their preference was for the facility to be a tramway, similar to that, which already existed in Dover at the time. Finally, whatever the company decided, colliery trucks could only be used on land purchased by the company and the track could not go through the town.
The Company chose the road option following the route given in the outline proposal. It was to be 50feet (16 metres) wide with a 15-feet (5 metres) wide pavement on each side. The estimated cost was £43,000 and it was expected to provide employment for up to 300 men. The council suggested that Pearsons paid one third, the Corporation a third and it would be expected that the government’s Unemployment Grants Committee would pay the remainder.
In the autumn of 1922, Pearsons joined forces with steel makers Dorman Long, to form Pearson & Dorman Long Company and take over most of the rights from the Kent Coal Concessions. The latter company had been set up by Arthur Burr, the East Kent mining entrepreneur, in 1896 with the purpose of buying potential underground coal fields but not surface land. By 1906, the company had secured coal mining rights in East Kent sufficient, it was said, for 20 collieries. Burr’s large portfolio of mining associated companies in East Kent were consolidated in 1913 under the name of Kent Coal Concessions. The giant steel makers, Dorman Long held 30,000 shares in the consolidated company as borings had confirmed the existence of iron stone. In 1917, a partial consolidation had created the Channel Steel Company and included Snowdown Colliery. Although Kent Coal Concessions did retain some mineral rights, due to the economic depression no one was interested in leasing them and in 1925, the company folded.
Having amalgamated the newly styled Pearson Dorman Long company immediately started the preliminary work on what resulted in Betteshanger Colliery. However, as they did not own the surface land they were unable to sink the pit. Albeit, through the subsidiary, Channel Steel Company, they proposed building a steel works between Dover and St Margaret’s adjacent to the proposed new road and Dover Corporation gave their approval.
The council applied to the Unemployment Grants Committee stating that the cost for the new road was £56,000. The Committee asked for the plans to be modified and suggested that the Ministry of Transport and Kent County Council (KCC) should contribute towards the costs. While these applications were being made the road was put on hold. During the winter of 1923-24, the revised estimate had increased to £129,000 but government financing was not forthcoming.
On 29 September 1923, the Admiralty formerly handed the port over to the Dover Harbour Board (DHB), still headed by Sir William Crundall. This included the Sea Front Railway line but the Eastern Dockyard was retained by the Admiralty and let on lease to Stanlee Ship-breaking Company. The Camber was retained for Admiralty purposes.
During spring and summer of 1924, Dover’s Mayor, Richard Barwick, and the Town Clerk, Reginald Knocker, visited various government departments laying before them the urgent need for unemployment relief. The Ministry of Transport relented and sanctioned the borrowing of £45,000. In the autumn of 1924 sites near Kingsdown were put on the market through Protheroe and Morris of Cheapside, London. Channel Collieries Trust held the mineral rights under the property and the sites were bought by Pearson Dorman Long – at last, they could sink Betteshanger Colliery.
Unemployment continued to rise and in 1925 DHB applied to Parliament to close Dover harbour’s Western entrance. They wanted to run a railway line along the Southern Breakwater to load Kent coal onto ships for export from there. However, the disparity in exchange rates between the UK and the Continent meant that the country was importing coal and the application came under a lot of criticism.
On the subject of Exchange Rate parity and the negative effect it was having on British industry, Sir Arthur Dorman made a powerful and well reported speech (Economist 19.12.1925). He begged the government for equal parity in the exchange rates but the response was: ‘a strong £ was the sign of a strong country.‘ Pearson Dorman Long wrote to the council saying that they could no longer afford to contribute to the cost of the road.
Cheap imports of coal continued to affect the domestic industry but in February 1926, the government did give a grant of £2m to the Kent coalfields. However, at midnight on 3 May saw the beginning of the General Strike. In October, that year, the council finally heard from the Unemployment Grants Committee through a letter sent to the town’s Member of Parliament (1922 -1945), Major the Hon. John Jacob Astor. The Committee had declined to provide a grant for the East Cliff Road, the reason given was that ‘unemployment in Dover was not sufficiently exceptional to warrant relief.’ It was generally felt that the refusal was retaliatory because East Kent miners had joined the national strike.
Richard Tilden Smith, who had been involved in a bitter legal action against the Dover, St Margaret’s and Martin Mill Light Railway Company in 1913, bought Tilmanstone Colliery from the Official Receiver in November 1926. At the same time an application was made by Tilmanstone (Kent) Collieries Ltd for the right to carry an aerial ropeway for a distance of 6½ miles (this was stated in the original application) from their colliery. This was to include a tunnel being cut through the cliffs to the Eastern Dockyard. The proposed course extended over land owned by 18 different personages one of which was Southern Railway. Although permission was granted, Southern Railway, and the Pearson, Dorman Long’s Channel Steel Company appealed but this was overturned and works started.
In 1927 Weetman Dickinson Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, died. Under the 1896 terms of agreement between the War Department and Pearsons, the line from East Cliff to Langdon Hole had to be restored to its original condition. In May 1929, the War Department took legal action forcing Channel Steel Company to pay £1,300 compensation for the breach of covenant. The next month, the same Department sold the land to … the Channel Steel Company!
At the same time, Tilden Smith leased 24 acres of land at Langdon Hole from the War Department for cement works that would utilise chalk from Dover’s white cliffs. He also planned steel and brick works nearby – that was to be part of his plan for East Kent to become the New Industrial Eden. While on 17 March 1927, Southern Railway sought permission to carry coal on the Sea Front Railway and along the Eastern Arm of the Eastern Dockyard to specially built giant bunkers.
Tilden Smith’s, now 7½ mile, aerial ropeway from Tilmanstone colliery to the Eastern Arm was formerly opened on 14 February 1930. The ceremony was simple as Tilden Smith had died suddenly in the House of Commons on 18 December 1929. The tunnels, through which the ropeway ran to the Eastern Arm, can still be seen.
Bunkers were built but in August 1928 a huge coal staithe to be installed at the end of Eastern Arm, was commissioned by Southern Railway. It was built of ferro-concrete by the Yorkshire Hennebique Construction Company and held 5000-tons of coal. The Staithe was fitted with electronic discharging mechanism that enabled a vessel to be loaded with 500 tons of coal an hour and cost £22,000.
DHB withdrew its proposal to close the Western entrance and focused on increasing the number of coal sidings at the Eastern Dockyard. It was clear that this was to enable the export of coal from Pearson Dorman Long’s Snowdown and Betteshanger collieries. The electronic coal staithe officially started operating on 19 April 1932. The first ship was Dover’s steamer Kenneth Hawksfield, which was loaded with 2,450 tons coal from Snowdown Colliery.
Although it was suggested that a rail link would be built through a tunnel from the Eastern Arm to join the Deal railway line at Kearsney, until such time the Sea Front railway was to be used. It was anticipated that the railway would be in use 14-hours a day and would carry 800,000tons of coal a year together with scrap iron and oil for refuelling ships. The coal was transported on the Sea Front Railway.
The first train from Snowdown Colliery at 09.00 and in the next 23-hours, 18 trainloads of coal was carried on the Sea Front Railway line choking its whole course with dust. 17,000 Dovorians signed a petition that was sent to the House of Lords. Parliament restricted the use of the Railway to carrying a maximum of 500,000 tons of coal a year and only during day light. In 1933, Parliament approved a DHB Bill for a 1.75-mile railway line from the Kearsney junction, on the Deal line, through a tunnel to the Eastern dockyard. Although this would have obviated the need of the Sea Front Railway to carry coal, with the death of Sir William Crundall, the Chairman of DHB, in 1934, the scheme was abandoned as too expensive.
On 1 April 1934, Dover Borough municipal boundaries were extended bringing in to the Borough, Eastern Dockyard and Arm but the cliffs overlooking the area remained part of the Rural District. That same year, the council resurrected the idea of finishing the Cliff Road to St Margaret’s utilising the earlier Light Railway Company’s permit. This had been renewed every year and was given added impetus in 1937 when, due to war preparations and the shortage of scrap iron, the remaining track of what had once been the Pearsons line was lifted.
Following the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), the War Office instigated the building of the Martin Mill Military Railway, operated and manned by the Royal Engineers and using diesel locomotives. The line followed the original Pearsons route from Martin Mill to a point called RDF Junction, about 900 feet ( 275 metres) past the then Dover-Deal road bridge. Here it divided, with the ‘main line’ turning north-east to service the guns, Winnie and Pooh. Passing beneath Winnie’s gun barrel it crossed the St Margaret’s – Martin Mill Road to Pooh’s position.
A second line, from the RDF Junction, went straight ahead for about half a mile, then in a north-east direction for another half a mile. This served the Wanstone and South Foreland Batteries. The battery close to the Dover Patrol Memorial, Point at Leathercote Point, was served by a branch line from Decoy Junction – this was named after a dummy Winnie, on the ‘main line’.
Winnie and Pooh were two 14-inch ex-naval guns manned by the Royal Marines and were capable of firing their missiles across the 21-mile wide Dover Strait to France. Winnie was installed during the Battle of Britain, in 1940 on St Margaret’s golf links and was soon after joined by Pooh, located along the Kingsdown Road.
In August 1942 Jane and Clem, two 15-inch guns, came into operation overlooking Fan Bay Battery, an emergency battery with three six-inch guns. Jane was originally designed for HMS Repulse and named after a Daily Mirror cartoon character. Clem was said to be named after the Labour leader Clement Attlee (1883-1967) or Winston Churchill’s (1874-1965) wife Clementine (1885-1977)! These were wire wound guns made of a composite of steel and steel wire. The construction was introduced in the 1890’s to deal with the increased pressures in the barrel caused by the use of the then new propellant – cordite. Radar was installed and linked with the guns that proved successful.
There were also three 13.5-inch calibre railway guns manned by Royal Marines and called Gladiator, Piecemaker and Sceneshifter. During periods of inaction, these guns were normally hidden in the Guston tunnel but sometimes in tunnels at Shepherdswell and Martin Mill.
The Battery at South Foreland was equipped with four 9.2-inch guns, while near the Dover Patrol Memorial was the Bruce gun. An experimental, hypervelocity gun built by Vickers and weighing 86-tons. The barrel was 60 feet long and could fire a shell weighing 256lbs over a distance of 100,000 yards – 57-miles. However, it was never fired in anger due to the enormous pressure affecting the shell fuses causing some to explode prematurely in mid-flight. All the real guns were hidden under camouflage netting, while dummy ones were partially concealed on the cliff top site, which accounts for the reason why the cliff top is pitted with craters.
By late 1944, the operational use of the Martin Mill Military Railway was declining, only being used to move stores and equipment. Following the end of hostilities, the Light Railway Company resumed management and some of the track was sold for export to Tanganyika as part of the ill-fated Groundnut Scheme (1947-1951). However, beyond that and seeking repeated extensions, nothing else happened and in 1952, the company officially ceased trading.
By that time, the route across the cliffs had become a favourite walk but in the spring of 1954, due to the Cold War, the military began erecting a 5-foot chestnut fence on either side of what had been the 6-foot wide track. Vigorous protests were made and the military agreed to remove the fence from the seaward side except where it enclosed military installations. Three years later the Big Guns – Jane, Clem, Winnie and Pooh were dismantled and uprooted from their reinforced concrete emplacements. The smaller guns were also removed.
About 200 acres of land, which had been commandeered by the military between Dover and St Margaret’s, was de-requisitioned following the stand-down of Coastal Artillery in 1956. Much of the remaining railway track was lifted although the rails and bridges at the Martin Mill end were still in situ in 1960. At that time, the Ministry of Transport was considering using the track for a motorway approach to Eastern Docks.
Finally, during the post-war period, Marine Parade was widened and the Sea Front Railway safety fence was removed. In order to tell tourists to remove their parked cars off the track, a man with a red flag walked in front of the trains! Robert Eade, Dover’s Mayor in 1961, was one. By that time freight traffic, using the service was declining and the last train – a diesel locomotive pulling three wagons, ran on the 31 December 1964. The lines were eventually covered with tarmac.
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