Brill Tramway - Improvement and Diversification

Improvement and Diversification

By the mid-1870s the slow locomotives and their unreliability and inability to handle heavy loads were major problems. In 1874 Ferdinand de Rothschild bought a 2,700-acre (1,100 ha) site near Waddesdon station from John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, for his planned Waddesdon Manor. Jones and the Duke recognised that construction would increase the haulage of heavy goods and that the engines would not cope.

Engineer William Gordon Bagnall had established the locomotive firm of W. G. Bagnall in 1875. Bagnall wrote to the Duke offering to hire his first locomotive for trials. On 18 December 1876 the locomotive, Buckingham, was delivered. It entered service on 1 January 1877, mainly on the steep section of the line between Wotton and Brill. Although Jones was unhappy with some aspects of Buckingham, he recognised the improvement and ordered a locomotive from Bagnall for £640 (about £44,700 as of 2013). Wotton was delivered on 28 December 1877 and Buckingham was returned to Bagnall in February 1878.

Buckingham and Wotton were more reliable than the Aveling and Porter engines. With modern locomotives on the Brill–Quainton Road route (the Kingswood branch generally remained worked by horses, and occasionally by the Aveling and Porter engines), traffic rose. The figure for milk traffic rose from 40,000 gallons carried in 1875 to 58,000 gallons (260,000 l; 70,000 US gal) in 1879, and in 1877 the Tramway carried 20,994 tons (21,331 t) of goods. In early 1877 it appeared on Bradshaw maps and from May 1882 Bradshaw listed the timetable.

A fatal accident of a very sad nature occurred on Thursday evening last on the Wotton Tramway between Brill and Quainton Road. The ladies' maid of Lady Mary Grenville, daughter of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, was, it appears, with two other ladies' maids walking along the Tramway, and when near a spot where it is crossed by the highway were overtaken by the engine who sounded his whistle and two of them promptly left the track. Ellen Maria Nicholls lingered for a moment to look at the train and was knocked down and killed instantaneously. The body was taken to Wotton House.

Despite frequent derailments, low speed meant Wotton Tramway had a good safety record. The locomotives occasionally ran over stray sheep, and on 12 September 1888 sparks from one of the Aveling and Porter engines blew back into one of the train's cattle trucks, igniting the straw bedding and badly burning two cows. The line had one serious accident, in which Ellen Maria Nickalls, a servant at Wotton House, was struck by a locomotive near Church Siding and killed. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death, absolving driver James Challis.