Snowdrift at Bleath Gill (1955)

Interesting facts

Snowdrift at Bleath Gill is a 1955 British Transport Film documentary directed by Kenneth Fairbairn. The 10-minute-long film presents a first-hand account of a team of British Railways workmen freeing a goods train stuck in a snowdrift on the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway at Bleath Gill in the Pennines on the border between County Durham, Yorkshire and Westmorland. A fine example of an industrial documentary, the British Film Institute call it "One of the most outstanding films of its kind".

Production

BR Standard Class 2 2-6-0 No. 78018, hauling the 4:20 am goods train, set out from Kirkby Stephen on the morning of Thursday, 24 February 1955, hauling eight 20-ton wagons of limestone and minerals. At 5 am, she became stuck at Bleath Gill, just north of Barras railway station and near Stainmore Summit which at 1,370 feet (420 m) high was the highest point on any railway line in England until its closure in 1962.

On the rescue train were a crew of BTF staff—director Kennith Fairbairn, cameraman Robert Paynter and assistant David Watkin—who had been hurriedly assigned by producer Edgar Anstey to travel to Barnard Castle to join the snowplough and a gang of fifty men travelling up the line to free the train.

The task was an arduous one; winds of 40 miles per hour (60 km/h) were blowing across the summit, which coupled with the arctic-like weather conditions to produce a terrible wind chill factor. The film crew themselves had not prepared for the filming, having been summoned to make the film at short notice; Bob Paynter recalled in 2008 that the film crew had not even brought anything to eat with them, and had to rely on the generosity of the workme…

Having dug the engine out of the snowdrift during the night, moving the steam locomotive was another difficult task; when a steam train gets stuck in snow, the heat from its boiler melts the snow around it, but as the boiler cools the melted snow refreezes as ice, meaning that the engine is frozen solid. Workmen had to drape paraffin-soaked rags around the moving parts of the engine and set fire to them to thaw the motion.

David Watkin, the camera assistant on the film (who later became an Oscar-winning cinematographer) recalled that at a subsequent screening of the film in the area, one of the railway officials commented "If it hadn't been for the fucking film people we'd have just left her to thaw out."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.