Scole Railway river bridge - a photo on Flickriver

            Girder rail bridge which crosses the river at Frenze Hall, Diss, Norfolk. This was once part of the Scole Railway which was built by William Betts to service the Frenze estate in South Norfolk. The estate was purchased by Betts in the 1860s and he turned it's 400 acres over to vast market gardens which supplied the markets in London with fresh vegetables. The return journey brought wagons full of manure up from the city's stables and streets to spread on the fields of the estate. His standard gauge rail line covered some seven miles in total, connecting to the main Great Eastern Railway line at Diss, heading east to Dark Lane where it branched east and north via a turntable. The eastern branch continued on to buffers just behind the Scole Inn, with two further branches along its route which led south to Betts brick fields and north to Nab Barn. The northern branch from Dark Lane took the line up to Frenze Hall farm, before crossing the river over this bridge and ending at buffers near to the GER line. Another branch below Frenze Hall continued up to a field known as "Scotland".

William Betts purchased two locomotives for the Scole Railway - a 0-6-0 built by Brotherhoods of Chipenham and an 0-4-0 tank by Hughes of Loughborough. 

Vast barns and other ancillary buildings were also built on the Frenze estate at the same time the railway was built, many of which still stand. 

Betts died in 1885, his wife and eldest son having pre-deceased him. It seems that his affairs were left in a rather tangled state with mortgages being held by the Taylor family in Diss. Auctioneer and land agent Thomas William Gaze became the tenant at Frenze Hall and eventually held the auction to sell off Betts estate and its machinery and equipment in 1887. . The rail lines were pulled up and sold for scrap, the two locomotives were sold for £20 each and were shipped to India.

Very little evidence of the railway's existence, other than this bridge still remain, although evidence of William Betts huge market gardening empire certainly so! More photographs relating to Betts will follow.

Information sourced from "Waveney Valley Studies" by Eric Pursehouse, published in 1969 and "The Scole Railway" by N.A. Brundell and K.J. Whittaker, published in The Railway Magazine April 1955.

Taken on: November 17, 2013

Tags:

Scole

Railway

Betts

Diss

Frenze

Hall

1800s « less

Sets appears in: • William Betts & The Scole Railway • Norfolk

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