The
Eastern Union Railway
The story
of the EUR is, perhaps, not well enough known
and examples of lettering in Station Street and Croft Street are the
visible vestiges of the original ipswich terminus. The most obvious is
on the concrete plinth which is on Station
Street close to the corner with the
southernmost part of Rectory
Road.
Serif'd italic capitals are picked out in black paint against a
white-painted background: kept in very good condition by the club, no
doubt. A short way along Rectory Road is the attractive frontage of the
Locomotive Social Club replete with illuminated black and white steam
train sign.
Follow that
part of Rectory Road round a right angle
and Croft Street slopes down the hill and near the bottom we find two
adjacent buildings on opposite corners of Webb Street. Both were busy
public houses in the heyday of the railway and West Bank dockland area.
CAMRA's
excellent Suffolk Real Ale Guide (see Links)
is
invaluable for tracking not just current real ale pubs, 'fizz-only'
pubs and former pubs, but also some putative old pubs. (There are also
period photographs of the pubs when they were open for business.) There
is no doubting these two buildings, though: they have the look of
public houses with their 45 degree angle corner entrances facing one
another over Webb Street.
The Great Eastern (ironically the smaller of the two), 42-44 Croft
Street, alternatively known as GER was closed in 1996.
The EUR (alternatively known as the Eastern Union Railway, Railway
Hotel) at 36-38 Croft St opened around 1850 and was closed in 2005. A
stylish circular monogram: 'EUR' interlaces the three characters in a
most satisfactory emblem, forming part of the ceramic-faced lower part
of the pub's frontage. This monogram appears twice on this face of the
building.
So why did
this quiet Ipswich back street boast two
sizeable public houses? The answer is in the coming of the railway to
this part of Stoke and with it employment, earth movement, civil and
heavy engineering and increasing road traffic. The Eastern Union
Railway was opened for public passenger traffic on
15 June 1846 from an end-on junction with the Eastern Counties Railway
at
Colchester to the first terminus station at Croft Street, Ipswich which
later became engine sheds and sidings once a new Ipswich station
opened. The tunnel opened on 26
November 1846 with a trial train to Bury St Edmunds, and fully opened
to passengers on 7 December 1846. Ipswich Station on its present site
opposite the top of Princes Street was opened in1860. The GER was
formed in
1862 by amalgamation of the Eastern Counties
Railway with smaller railways: the Norfolk Railway, the Eastern Union
Railway, the Newmarket and Chesterford Railway, the East Norfolk
Railway, the Harwich Railway, the East Anglian Railway and the East
Suffolk Railway among others.
This is thought to be the earliest tunnel in
the country to be built on a sharp continous
curve,
excavations for which unearthed from deep in
Stoke hill: fossilised woolly elephant, lion
and rhinocerous dating from before the great Ice Age. 'Stoke Bone Beds'
the source is apparently called. Stories
of roof collapses and a myriad of problems including complaints from
houses in the roads around Belstead Avenue that their wells had run dry
because all the spring water now drained into the tunnel below were
finally overcome. Improvements in the 1970s finally drained the
waters fully away via conduits and the whole tunnel track-bed had to be
lowered in the 1990s so that larger container trains to and from
Felixstowe docks could be accomodated. Walking above the overgrown
Belstead
Avenue/Luther Road area above the tunnel entrance today you would
barely know that a main line
railway was operating in the deep cutting way below thundering into and
out of Stoke hill.
See a few more comments on the railway relating to Arch Cottage on our Bourne
Park page.
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throughout the Ipswich Signs and
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Lettering sites: Borin Van Loon
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