Ongoing story of the Railway

By the late John Hayward

The little station called Keymer Junction on the south side of the converging railways, in the ‘V’ of the tracks, had attracted insufficient local use since its opening in 1847 and it closed in 1883. Housing for railway workers was later provided around the Junction: a pair of cottages in the ‘V’, another pair immediately west of the track at the ‘Bumpy Bridge’, a detached house at the head of Nye Road and a station manager’s house in Junction Road immediately north of the Bumpy Bridge. This footbridge, now a vital link for people from the growing east side of town, perpetuated an ancient pedestrian right of way from Ditchling Common to St. John’s Common and was particularly used by people east of the tracks to get to the windmill on St. John’s Common before it closed down.

The Lewes line itself gained a boost when the Keymer Brick & Tile Company began production in 1875 at a site off Junction Road, adjacent to the line. A siding was built into the works.  This brought in wagons, mainly of coal for firing the kilns, etc., and took out wagons of bricks, tiles and terra cotta ware.  The firm benefitted greatly for many years from the nightly train taking their products down to the expanding towns of Eastbourne, Bexhill, St. Leonards and Hastings. However, there was a slow decline in traffic to and from the siding and it was eventually it was closed on 29th May 1970.

Keymer Junction station closed on 1st November 1883 due to ‘little traffic’ and was demolished in May 1888. However, in the meantime, the new station spanning Leylands Road at Worlds End had been built and it opened on 1st August,1886. This retained the name Keymer Junction but, as the story goes, a visiting coroner alighted there from the London train.  He was trying to get to Keymer village (over 4 miles away), to hold an official enquiry into a death, Upset and furious to find that he was nowhere near the village, he made such a fuss that it was agreed to find a new name for the station. ‘Worlds End’ was suggested but a local religious group took umbrage. The name Wivelsfield was then chosen and adopted on 1st July 1896.  Without a proper bus service, until more recently, from Worlds End to Wivelsfield village (2½ miles away), the new name continued for decades to inconvenience the unwary passenger.

In 1879 and 1882 proposals were made by the LB&SCR to build a flyover at Keymer Junction to enable trains coming from the Lewes direction to cross over the down main London to Brighton line, thus avoid a conflicting movement between trains from Lewes and those heading south on the Brighton main line. This idea did not come to fruition but instead, in 1888, a new cast iron footbridge was erected at the Junction Road level crossing, over the railway, enabling pedestrians to cross the railway when the gates were closed to road traffic. Its presence lingers on in our memories and in old photographs as an iconic part of the view down Junction Road. There were several further proposals to build this flyover in 1902, 1927 and in the 1950s, have all foundered mainly for financial or economic reasons.

The following images show: First, the Spatham Lane signal box and local railway workers. Second, “soldiers farewell”, local housewives giving WW1 soldiers a send off and showing what was then the new footbridge over the railway. Third, victorian housing development north of the railway crossing, with view of Junction box in the distance.

A terrible collision occurred in 1899 in deep fog, when a boat train from Newhaven had joined the main line but stopped at a red light just north of Wivelsfield Station. A train heading to London from Brighton crashed at speed into the back of the stationary one, causing many injuries and some fatalities. In 1926, a train collided with a furniture van on Bedelands Farm crossing and, as a result, the crossing was closed to vehicles on 7th March 1927. Like the ‘Bumpy Bridge further south, it perpetuates and ancient east-west track which ran from Wivelsfield Church to the Chapel of St. John on Fairplace Hill and is still marked on the map as a public footpath. Sadly though, the young daughter of the Hicks family, then farmers at Bedelands, was killed on the crossing in 1935 when she was just five years old.

The Brighton main line was electrified, with public services commencing on 1st January 1933 and at the same time the Keymer Junction signal box, controlling the Junction Road level crossing, took over control of the main line between Hayward’s Heath and Preston Park, making several other signal boxes redundant.  The iron foot bridge in Junction Road was removed on 3rd December 1978, when automatic lifting barriers at the level crossing were installed. Another iconic link to the past, the Keymer Junction signal box itself was closed on 25th June 1983.  Its removal was witnessed sadly by a small crowd of locals, railway enthusiasts and souvenir hunters. The crossing is now controlled via CCTV by the Three Bridges Railway Operating Centre.

The increasing population of Burgess Hill from the 1950s onwards meant that the number of people commuting to London for work was steadily increasing. As a result, in the early 1960s, the platforms of both Burgess Hill and Wivelsfield stations were lengthened to accommodate 12 car trains. Meanwhile the transport of goods by rail was declining as the new motorway system expanded.   Burgess Hill goods yard was closed on 7th November, 1966. At the Junction, all the railway houses in the vicinity were demolished by British Rail in the 1980s. It was around that times that the plan to close the ‘Bumpy Bridge footway from Junction Road (St Andrew’s Church area) to St. Wilfred’s Road. Was put forward and, thankfully, quashed.

Recurring ‘scares’ about the possible closure of Wivelsfield Station have so far come to nothing as local train journeys kept rising with more housing estates being built nearby, and as the local State school children, sixth formers and further education students started commuting to Hassocks, Haywards Heath and Lewes. Useful side gates at Burgess Hill have been brought into use and a new ramp on the down line at Wivelsfield to aid the luggage-wheeling public in this post-porterage age.

The land-slip problems encountered in building the railway down to Worlds End have re-surfaced. For no apparent reason the trees were cut down around 2016 on a short stretch of the embankment north (west side) of the station. Three winters later, after heavy January rains, a massive landslide occurred, at that exact spot, which took many weeks to put right using ugly iron revetments. The height of the station itself above street level is a continuing problem for many passengers and we look forward, hopefully, for lifts at both Burgess Hill’s stations and hope they will arrive soon.

The following images show: First, Wivelsfield booking hall on its 100^th birthday. Second, Wivelsfield Station with staff and train approaching and third, an old chap in Leylands Road under the railway bridge, sadly Leylands Road is no longer a place for a quiet stroll!

The following photographs are part of John Hayward’s archives bequeathed to the Burgess Hill Heritage & History Association. We are grateful for his lifetimes research and dedication without which we not be able to provide such detailed information.

A Postscript…on Worlds End and the late author of this railway history, John Hayward; The presence of the station at Worlds End gave a rapid boost to housing provision and the arrival of shops and a post office and stores (originally called North End) in the immediate vicinity. The Watermill pub was built on its present site, reputedly replacing a slightly older, smaller building still standing on the corner which, according to the late Johnny Ashdown, former greengrocer of Worlds End, had previously been the pub. The Lord of the manor, Somers Clarke, gave some wayside manorial waste for a Reading Room and the land for the Junction Road Schools, as well as the recreation ground, while the Ashdown family gave their land in Junction Road for the entrance to the Rec.

The railway hub had turned Worlds End into an ‘urban village’ community which still has its school, pub, Post Office and grocery store, a garage, hairdressers’, fish and chip shop, bakery, newsagent’s, café and a garage for car maintenance. Other newer businesses, such as Baan Thai (take-away) and pet grooming have been welcomed. In the 1970s it also had Ashdown’s the greengrocers, Stubbins the newsagent, Thorne’s the butcher, Waugh’s the chemist, Johnson’s Dairy stores, an electrical supplies shop, a hardware store, an off-licence and a knitwear shop. The 1980s baker, Francis, used the cast-iron Victorian ovens of a bakehouse behind Junction Road and walked through the back alleys (rights of way since quashed) and down Gladstone Road to the recently-built shop by the station.  From my kitchen window, I enjoyed seeing his daily trek, often balancing a tray of fresh bread and rolls on his shoulder. The bakery itself has survived and the ovens are now within the shop’s premises.

The following images show: First, children outside the Watermill Inn at Worlds End. Second, the old bakery between Junction and Gladstone Roads (late 1970’s), and third, history repeating itself: rebuilding the embankment in January 2020 after a  landslip just north of Wivelsfield Station, the same stretch where landslips  had delayed the completion of the line.

John Hayward sadly died in February 2022.  He had enjoyed a life-time’s interest in the railway and his entire career was spent in its employment. He moved here in the late 1970s and became Chairman of the World’s End Residents Association a few years after it was formed in 1979. Stepping down after a number of years, he continued to work hard on local issues. There were ongoing problems caused by the repeated flooding of the pavement and road in the vicinity of the railway bridge. But as well as flagging them up, he identified solutions and made sure they were attended to. Fighting cancer for several years, his death was not unexpected and, at my request, he had recently precised and distilled years of research specifically for the articles on transport for this web site, working on them while his health was steadily deteriorating. The BHHHA is most grateful for his perseverance and has accepted his archive of railway history research which we will make available for others to study and enjoy in due course.

We are grateful for the verbal history about Worlds End, freely given by the late Johnny Ashdown. Evidence, circa 1850, for the ‘Bumpy Bridge’ footpath is from an old title deed at ESRO/The Keep, ref: SAS/EG/497

To read more about the 1899 train crash, go to the Historic Events page