Distance: 1.25 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium (steep steps and narrow stilies)

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Short walk, just over a mile, mostly on footpaths, uphill from Whatstandwell Railway Station on the Derwent Valley line to Crich Tramway Village. Making for the easiest way of getting to the National Tramway Museum without a car.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

A Tramcar Named Southampton 45…

As is frequently the case with the vehicle, and especially railed vehicle, preservation movements, the story that led to the establishment of Crich Tramway Village (the operating name of the National Tramways Museum) in an abandoned mid-Derbyshire limestone quarry, starts with an impulse purchase.

In this case it was a group of enthusiasts out on a daytrip in 1948 to the last operating day of Southampton Corporation Tramways, who decided to buy one of the older, smaller trams for the relatively paltry sum of ten pounds. The tramcar’s name was Southampton 45.

Even in the 1940s trams in Britain were becoming few and far between. Over the next decade most of the remaining networks closed, with Glasgow being the last significant tramway to close in 1962, leaving only Blackpool with a small network. Which was the only public tramway in the country until Sheffield and Manchester began building their networks in the 1980s.

This is why the tram preservation movement emerged almost a generation before the volunteer steam railway (generally associated with the more fogyish currents of the 1960s and 1970s) came onto the scene. 

It was in 1955 that the scattered tram enthusiasts and preservers came together to form the Tramway Museum Association. They resolved to open a national museum celebrating and preserving their cherished relics of a fast vanishing part of the UK’s public transport history.

The Crich site that they alighted upon in 1959, first leasing and then buying the former quarry, had a long history with tramways. Now quite rural parts of Derbyshire were criss-crossed with tramways from the 17th and 18th Centuries onwards moving limestone, lead and other resources extracted from the geologically rich hills in and around the Peak District. 

Geordie railway pioneer George Stephenson was an early fan of the Derbyshire hills, moving to the north of the county in the latter part of his life. But he was also a hard nosed capitalist and at Crich he sensed a business opportunity. Having uncovered coal seams around Clay Cross when constructed what became the Midland Mainline in the mid-1830s George Stephenson alighted upon the Crich site as the perfect location near the burgeoning railway network for him to set up a lime burning works. Vast quantities of the coal was shipped on narrow gauge railways to Crich where it was used to light giant furnaces where limestone freshly hewn from the hills where it had sat for over 300 million years was crushed, burnt and shipped onwards for use in all manner of industrial processes.

By the late 1950s the quarry and the ovens had shut. Much like the Ironbridge Gorge and the wider east Shropshire coalfield in the western part of the region, as one of the first places to develop heavy industry, so the Derwent Valley and mid-Derbyshire generally, was one of the first places to lose its heavy industry.

Enthusiasts from the Talyllyn narrow gauge railway in Wales, who were lifting track on the site, tipped off the Tramway Museum Association as to the location. Upon viewing it they liked it, adopting it as their base in 1959.

The site was developed rapidly during the 1960s. In 1963 the first horse drawn tram ran on the restored line up into the former quarry, followed in 1964 by the first electric tram.

As the museum’s Wikipedia entry laconically notes, initially the enthusiasts were so pleased to have a base from which to work on, store and run their trams that they gave little thought to the attraction that they were developing. It was only in 1967 when it was decided that given tramcars historically had not run into disused quarries, that for the benefit of visitors (and other potential fee paying users like film production companies…) that they should construct a little streetscene to evoke an unspecified period roughly circa 1870 – 1940 during British urban tramway’s heyday.

The resulting restored street scene is akin to a miniature version of living history museums at Blists Hill, the Black Country Living Museum and Beamish further afield. It includes old tramway buildings, fixtures and fittings, as well as a pub rescued from Stoke-on-Trent and an old bank from Lancashire, as well as most impressively, the facade of the fire damaged Derby Assembly Rooms which was erected at Crich in the mid-1970s. Further up the line there is a recreated Victorian looking park complete with bandstands, and beyond that various more rural seeming stops, recalling the world of work and leisure opportunities that the expansion of tramways opened up alike.

In this way Crich Tramway Village is firmly a part of the living history museum movement, with its complex blend of fact and theme park, comforting nostalgia, and potential for reactionary and radical readings on the part of visitors alike.  

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file Dropbox

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This walk to Crich Tramway Village begins at Whatstandwell Railway Station. It is just over a mile, and the first half is up quite a steep hill.

Upon alighting at Whatstandwell station’s single platform whether you’ve come from Derby in the south or Matlock in the north make for the narrow metal footbridge across the tracks.

Cross the bridge emerging onto a snicket which runs steeply up towards the village.

Squeezing between two narrow bollards you emerge onto a main road.

Cross the road here and head slightly to the right.

Here on the left just beyond a primary school is a residential road running quite steeply uphill.

Follow this road uphill, it bends part way up.

A little way after the bend, there is a narrow semi paved lane running parallel with the main road behind a terrace of former worker’s cottages running off to the right.

Turn right and head along this lane.

Soon it leads out onto another narrow road.

Here you turn right. Walk up the road a short distance until you come to a short snicket next to a house.

Walk straight up this snicket until you come to another road.

Upon reaching this road turn right and walk along the pavement a short distance.

Soon on the left there is a footpath waymark pointing up another snicket leading to some steep, worn stone steps set into a hillside.

Follow these steps uphill. Along the way you cross several stiles.

Eventually these lead you out into an open field high above the River Derwent Valley.

There is a clear footpath straight ahead of you, follow this across the fields for several hundred metres, passing through narrow stiles between fields.

Behind you there are impressive views looking west across the Derwent Valley towards the Peak District.

Presently the village of Crich with its imposing church appears over the brow of the hill.

Here the path forks. Take the left hand fork making for a gap in a hedgerow.

Immediately after you cross the hedge line turn left again.

Walk along the path, following the boundary between a kind of “town meadow” for Crich and the open fields towards a scattering of houses in the near distance. Here you can see the top of the imposing neo-classical facade of Derby’s former Assembly Rooms erected at Crich Tramway Village in the 1970s.

Soon ahead of you next to a bungalow on the left there is a brown gate leading onto a track running between some houses.

Head through this gate – which is waymarked as a footpath – and walk along it past the houses towards the road.

Upon reaching the road the tramway museum is just to your right.

Turn right and walk past the “Townend” of the museum towards the entrance.

Upon reaching the entrance, turn left, cross the main road, and walk down the driveway across the car park towards the museum’s entrance cabin.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

A small number of buses serve the road outside the Tramway Museum. Their frequencies vary (and there is no service on Sundays) and they serve routes to nearby towns such as Matlock and Alfreton (which have stations) and Ripley and Heanor which do not, but which do have bus stations. Perhaps the easiest way to get back is to just follow the route that you came in reverse. But an alternative – with spectacular views – is to exit to the museum, turn right, and then just before passing the Cliff Inn turn left down a single track paved road. This leads you steadily downhill to the centre of Whatstandwell a very short distance from the Station. There are impressive views up the River Derwent Valley towards Cromford as you descend.