[Don't mind me. I'm just a line bump]

The Tidmouth, Knapford & Elsbridge Light Railway and the Wellsworth & Suddery Railway

Written and Researched by BNSF1995

Proofread and Corrected by Broa Island

The Sodor & Mainland wasn't the only standard gauge railway on Sodor. In 1867, an Act of Parliament was passed authorizing the construction of a railway on Sodor's southern peninsula. The railway, known as the Wellsworth & Suddery Railway, was originally built in 1870 as an industrial line, running along the coast between Crosby and Suddery, with an intermediate station at Wellsworth. It was run by four 0-6-0 tank engines. It eventually developed a considerable passenger clientele.

Tragedy struck in 1890 when the four tank engines were involved in a crash while pulling a long goods train together. All four were damaged beyond repair and had to be given the Final Firing. The W&S, after mourning their loss, saw it as a golden opportunity to modernize their fleet, and to that end, bought three tank engines. The first was custom ordered from Avonside, #1 Colin. The other two were purchased second-hand from the London and South Western Railway, these being an O2 Class (#2 Lily), and an Adams Radial Tank (#3 Adam) (Whose NOT the Adam your most likely thinking of!). All three served the line very well, with Colin the shunter, Lily the goods engine, and Adam the passenger engine.

The railway originally hoped to use Suddery as a harbor, however blown up masonry from Suddery Castle had created a bar preventing its use by shipping except of the very smallest draught. All attempts at dredging would prove to be costly failures, which resulted in the railway extending south along the coast to Brendam in the early 1900s, in hopes of having better luck at establishing a harbor there. The railway-built jetties at Brendam, which were greatly appreciated by the local fisherman, but the attempts at establishing a port were unsuccessful and the project was abandoned in 1909.

Meanwhile, on the western part of Sodor, another railway was opened. The first railway in the western area of Sodor was originally horse operated. Its origins begun when the Ulfstead Mining Company became interested in minerals at the high ground to the south-east of Toryreck but due to surrounding fen-lands could not extract or transport them by land and the section of the River Els from Elsbridge to Knapford was hazardous. To overcome the issue in 1883 they called in A. & Co, a firm who had the necessary experience from their engineering work on overcoming drainage problems in East Anglia. A. & Co built embankments across the flats north and south of the river and installed tide gates. With the addition of an embankment along the south eastern side of the River Els the water was allowed to flow into a pool along its opposite side that was left undeveloped. From here it was drained off every day at low tide. The line itself began from the wharf at Elsbridge and curved east to the mines at Toryreck and from there, keeping to the firmest ground, swung round on top of the embankments in a wide curve to bypass the remaining fen-land to reach the harbor at Knapford. The line opened in 1885 as the Elsbridge and Knapford Railway.

The harbor however proved a disappointment as it needed constant dredging and by 1905 the cost had become prohibitive. Under recommendation from A. , the mining company abandoned the harbor in favor of extending the line around the coastline to Tidmouth. Horses were not deemed appropriate for the longer haulage of the (mostly lead) minerals and A. 's young engineer Mr. Topham Hatt, was tasked to build light locomotives in their place. At Tidmouth he built four vertical boiler engines which were soon nicknamed the Coffee Pots.

This, however, is untrue. There were actually FIVE Coffee Pots. They were named Chuck, Jones, Tex, Avery, and Glynn.

All went well until autumn 1908, when the coastal section of the line was destroyed by a severe storm. The disruption of the tramway route lead to unemployment. With personal and financial ties to the mining company's operations A. helped arrange a loan from the Treasury to put the miners back to work by cutting a tunnel directly to Tidmouth. This operation was overseen by Topham Hatt and the first train steamed through in July 1910. The route lead to the renaming of the company to become the Tidmouth, Knapford and Elsbridge Light Railway.

In 1903, the TK&E followed the W&S's lead by modernizing its fleet. Chuck, Jones, Tex, and Avery were never well-behaved, and were allowed to wear out to justify giving them the Final Firing. Rather than being scrapped, though, their bodies were used as parts donors for Glynn, who became the new #1. The TK&E enjoyed a long and close relationship with the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, and to that end, acquired two locomotives from them. The first was #2 Preston, a D1 class tank engine who came off the boat with a set of three Autotrain coaches (two saloons and a control car), and the other was #3 Yang (whose nameplates read "The Ember Celica"), an experimental version of the H2 class tender engine. They also had three more tank engines custom-ordered: #4 Kate (who was given nameplates that read "Lady" as a tribute for the wife of the nobleman that built her), #5 Victor (whose colors were the inspiration for the standard NWR Blue scheme), and #6 Wallace, whose appearance was, until recently, a mystery (the only report we had to go on said he "looked similar to Percy").

In 1910, both the TK&E and W&S opened several major extensions, with the TK&E extending to the hamlet of Hackenbeck, and the W&S physically connected to the TK&E by extending from Crosby to Knapford. To cope with the amount of passenger services now using the station, a new six-road station was built, with three through passenger tracks, two stub tracks, and a goods-only line. Built east of the original tramway, the station would go on to become known as the "Big Station".

These extensions, while well-received by the farms and factories, also drained both railways financially, until they were on the brink of bankruptcy. So, in 1912, they made the rather smart decision to merge, forming the Tidmouth, Wellsworth, and Suddery Railway. The old TK&E mainline to Elsbridge and Hackenbeck was, as a result, demoted to branch line status. With the merger, construction of a line to the recently discovered china clay deposits northwest of Brendam could now be justified. This, along with the rapid industrialization of the Brendam area, led to the port at Brendam finally growing to become one of the three primary ports on Sodor, along with Knapford and Kirk Ronan, with minor ports at Arlesburgh and Norramby.

Then came 1914. The Great War had just broken out in Europe, and there were fears that Ireland would side with Germany and attack Sodor. After heated debates in Parliament over whether it was even worth defending the island, it was concluded that Sodor could potentially be used by the Central Powers as a staging ground to invade the mainland. And so, they turned to the one man they could trust to build a railway to defend the now-strategic island.

Topham Hatt was chief engineer of the TK&E, having designed Kate, Victor, and the Coffee Pots. He had hoped Kate and Victor's designs would be adopted by another railway, but alas, Kate's low coal capacity and Victor's general bulkiness rendered them mere one-offs.

And so, on September 1, 1914, the TW&S and S&M were joined together in a government-sponsored merger to form perhaps the most famous railway in the world:

The North Western Railway.