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Snowdrift at Bleath Gill
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Wikipedia article
'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 Westmoreland. A fine example of an industrial documentary, the British Film Institute call it "One of the most outstanding films of its kind".'[https://web.archive.org/web/20090205183730/http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/16031/?availableLicense=yes Snowdrift at Bleath Gill]' at the BFI Film and TV database
Production
BR Standard Class 2 2-6-0 No. 78018, hauling the 4:20am goods train, set out from Kirkby Stephen on the morning of Thursday, 24 February 1955, hauling eight 20-ton wagons of limestone and minerals.Chris Lloyd, '[http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/features/blogs/staff/echomemories/4730236.Snow_Drift_at_Bleath_Gill/ Snow Drift at Bleath Gill] ', 'The Northern Echo' 11 November 2009 At 5am, she became stuck at Bleath Gill, just north of Barras railway station and near Stainmore Summit which at high was the highest point on any railway line in England until its closure in 1962.[http://nicwhe8.freehostia.com/btf/productions/films/BT0213/BT213.html Snowdrift at Bleath Gill] at BTF Productions The train, along with its crew remained stranded there until 3pm the following Monday, when the first rescue teams arrived.
On the rescue train were a crew of BTF staffdirector Kennith Fairbairn, cameraman Robert Paynter and assistant David Watkinwho had been hurriedly assigned by producer Edgar Anstey to travel to 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 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 workmen. The light for the film was provided by large Tilley lamps, a type of pressure lamp, which needed pumping-up by hand frequently.
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."[http://davidwatkin.co.uk/snowdrift-at-bleath-gill-1955-for-bft/ Snowdrift at Bleath Gill, 1955 for BTF], davidwatkin.co.uk
Analysis
Most of the film is shot at night, which coupled with the black-and-white cinematography and paraffin lamp-lighting, gives the film an evocative atmosphere. The film was edited by John Legard, who noted during a BBC Four documentary about British Transport Films that the shot of the snowplough charging into the snowdrift the morning after the digging was completed is particularly memorable.[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f3pgc 'The British Transport Films' A 'Nation on Film' Special], BBC Four, 23 October 2008 Like the earlier 'Elizabethan Express' of 1954, the film features a commentary written by Paul le Saux, narrated by Deryck Guyler and Ben Williams. The film features a soundtrack of library music tracks by Hubert Clifford, Sidney Torch and Charles Williams.
In the 2008 BBC Four documentary, Dominic Sandbrook noted that in its celebration of hard manual labour the film is almost reminiscent of Soviet propaganda films. All of the people featured in the film are railway workmen from Darlington, West Auckland and Barnard Castle, as opposed to actors (as was sometimes the case in documentaries of the era). The author John Tomlinson cites this film as typifying the film unit's "celebration of energetic progressive industry".John Tomlinson, 'The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy' (SAGE, 2007), 47
Although the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway line over the Pennines was closed completely in 1965, the rescued steam locomotive BR Standard Class 2 No. 78018 was preserved and is currently operational on the Great Central Railway.[http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomotive.cfm?Display=5276 Steam Locomotive.info database entry] The snow plough seen is also preserved on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.[http://www.lner.info/forums/snowdrift-at-bleath-gill-p11805.html ex-NER snowplough number 18 / 900572] The original Stainmore Summit board is now held at the National Railway Museum at York. The film is currently available on DVD from the British Film Institute's British Transport Films collection (volume 1) and Blu-ray on 'The Best of The British Transport Films'. The film was sometimes used as a ten-minute "filler" on BBC Four (alternating with its BTF sibling 'John Betjeman Goes By Train', also ten minutes in duration)[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f2ksz BBC listing], bbc.co.uk and has also been shown on the archive film channel Talking Pictures TV.
See also
* 'Snow' a 1963 multi-award-winning BTF classic showing British Railway's dedication to battling blizzard conditions using an eight-minute montage cut to a jazzy sixties soundtrack.
References
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