A ride on the Southend Pier Railway

The long Easter weekend presented an opportunity to get away for a couple of nights and tick off another destination from my long list, Southend-on-Sea. While this may seem like a strange choice, I have long wanted to see Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.34 miles, with its battery powered railway.

In one sense I have already been to the pier, having stopped off at the pierhead on a pleasure cruise in 2015 but have never actually travelled the length of the pier for myself. To right that omission I picked up a ticket for the first passenger service of the day (10.30) and travelled to the twin track station at the end of pier before wandering back on foot at my leisure in rather blustery conditions.

Southend Pier Railway

The first pier at Southend was opened in 1830, though it only acquired its record breaking length after a series of extensions in the 1830s and 1840s. This wooden pier was eventually replaced by an iron pier in 1890. It was at this point that an electric railway was added, running from a lower level station out to the pier head on a single 3ft 6in gauge track using carriages built by Brush traction of Loughborough.

A single track proved inadequate for the continually growing visitor numbers and in 1930 the existing passing loops were connected, doubling the track. This in turn required proper signalling, with two signal boxes constructed that were manned during operations. The railway continued with this arrangement through the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s but by 1970 the changing demand of holiday goers had seen one line taken out of use.

The greatest moment of peril for the pier came in 1976 when a fire at the Pierhead gutted at the wooden buildings. Two years later the council closed the railway and sold it for scrap, arguing it was too dangerous to use. In 1980 the council permanently closed the pier, prompting a campaign that drew in public figures like Sir John Betjeman, the first Honorary President of the National Piers Society. Sir John said that closing Southend Pier would be “like taking the lung out of a living person” and like “taking the lungs out of London.” In his view Southend Pier was a wonderful bit of engineering and utterly irreplaceable.

The campaign was successful. Southend Council found the funding needed and set about restoring the pier, commissioning a completely new railway. Southend Pier was re-opened by Princess Anne on 2nd May 1986, with one of the new diesel powered trains named after Sir John Betjeman. The new railway used a single 3ft gauge track with two tracks at each station and a passing loop at the midway point. Standing on the shore it is impressive to see how far it stretches out into the distance.

The Southend Pier Railway: The last service of the day returns from the pierhead

The pier can be accessed at two levels at the landside end. Walkers are steered to the upper deck, where they walk down a ramp onto the pier walkway, while train passengers are directed straight ahead to the two-track lower level station. The journey takes somewhere around 9 minutes to make the journey up the line to the Pierhead station, leaving you with a short walk up to the RNLI boathouse and shop at the furthest end of the pier.

In an interview in 1976 Sir John Betjeman waxed lyrical about the journey, describing it thus: “You find yourself, when you got to the end of it, at sea without having to be seasick. You don’t go up and down. The sea is just quietly whispering round you. When you get back on land again, it’s like coming away from abroad.”

It sounds wonderful the way he describes it. While I didn’t quite have that sensation, travelling at a low point of the tide it was impressive to see the sands stretch way out from the shore and yet for the train still to deliver us to a point out to sea. The walk back alongside the railway certain makes you appreciate the distance you travelled with such ease on board the train.

The view from the train

One of the original train carriages, fondly nicknamed ‘toast racks’, can be seen in the marvellous Southend Pier Museum, located under the railway station in the old workshops (accessed from a doorway to the right of the station entrance on the lower deck of the pier). The museum also contains an example of the streamlined trains that took over in 1949 (beautifully restored after it was discovered in North Wales) and the diesel powered trains that replaced them in 1986 (complete with in-cab video showing the drivers eye view of the journey along the pier). Todays railway runs using eco-friendly electric trains that arrived in 2021, powered by lithium batteries that are recharged each night.

It is well worth making the time to have a good look around the Southend Pier Museum as the volunteers have done a terrific job of telling the story of the pier and its remarkable survival despite a number of fires and ship collisions, as well as surprising facts like its renaming as ‘HMS Leigh’ during wartime. There are so many fascinating exhibits, from the sobering charred and molten remains from previous fires to a delightful collection of restored penny slot machines. The museum also includes a wonderfully reconstructed signal box from the Pier.

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip out to Southend and to have finally travelled the length of the pier and entirely agree with Sir John Betjeman’s view that this is a national treasure.

Gallery