29.3.1847

North of the level crossing on the B1341 road

Newcastle & Berwick Railway

5.5.1941; reopened 7.10.1946; closed again 2.2.1953

Passengers (1941): London & North Eastern Railway
Passengers (1953): British Railways (North Eastern Region)
Goods (1965): British Rail (North Eastern Region)

Passenger platforms and buildings demolished. Goods loading bank is standing immediately south-east of the level crossing on the up side. The signal box base, south-east of crossing on down side, is retained as a relay room.

Notes: Lucker was quite remarkable as station of no importance yet possessing a building magnificent both in size and decoration; some of Britain’s towns were given inferior station buildings. Lucker was favoured because of a covenant made between George Hudson, who controlled the N&B, and Hugh, 3rd Duke of Northumberland. The Duke owned substantial stretches of land that the railway would cross, and he insisted that Lucker, which served the coastal townships of Bamburgh and North Sunderland, should be a ‘first-class station’, together with Warkworth, a ducal domain , and the station at the Alnwick branch junction. (See Fawcett in Addyman [Ed] 2011).

Lucker was one of the original stations provided on the East Coast main line when it was opened in 1847. The route through northern Northumberland crossed lightly populated countryside, failing to serve any of the area’s villages conveniently as it followed as direct and gently graded a route as possible northward to Berwick. The village of Lucker was about half-a-mile south-west of its station. The well-known, picturesque coastal village of Bamburgh, capital of the medieval kingdom of Northumbria and dominated by its heavily restored castle, was about four miles east of the station.  Although Lucker was the closest station to Bamburgh, the next station north at Belford was officially recognised as ‘Belford, for Bamburgh’.

Lucker station was provided with a characteristically opulent Tudor/Jacobean Newcastle & Berwick Railway building, and was among the finest of them. It was built of buff-coloured sandstone with a smooth ashlar finish, and it possessed two storeys. The N&B station building plan was most commonly H-shaped, as seen for example at Longhirst and Killingworth; the other plan, with a projecting centre on the platform elevation and a two-storey canted bay corbelled out to carry the gable above, was seen at Chathill and Stannington. Fawcett (2001) notes that both of these plans were combined with impressive effect at Lucker, yet the elaboration did not result in any great increase in the cost, which was £1219 compared with £1119 for Chathill. The platform elevation was further enhanced by gabled windows on either side of the projecting centre which, like the other gables, received the N&B decoration of ball finials. The gables ended with prominent kneelers, and the roofline was enlivened by tall chimneystacks. The forecourt elevation lacked the projecting central section, but the two gabled windows seen on the platform frontage were repeated facing the forecourt. From the northern wing a single-storey ridge-roofed section, reminiscent of local rustic cottages, extended perpendicular to the main building’s alignment and it continued further west with a lower roof. Each of the roofs was surmounted by a chimneystack. Altogether, the composition of the station building was fascinating.

The main building was on the down (south-west) platform, and on the opposite, facing platform was the standard pent-roof stone waiting shelter, the slope of the roof being down towards the platform edge. It is understood that the shelter was originally open but that here, as at other ECML stations in Northumberland, the North Eastern Railway closed it in with a timber-and-glass front.
In May 1849 the frequency of Lucker’s train service was shared with the other minor ECML stations in Northumberland and was provided by what had become the York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway (YNB). Between Newcastle and Berwick only Morpeth, Acklington, Lesbury (for Alnwick), Belford and Tweedmouth were served by more trains.

From 1854 the YNB was one of the constituents of the new North Eastern Railway, the company which operated Lucker station until the ‘Grouping’ of 1923. The NER provided the following service in February 1863:

The signal box at Lucker was constructed by the North Eastern Railway in 1873, replacing a ‘Ground Cabin’. It was located south-east of the level crossing on the down side of the line and was an N1 design with a stone base and a special low window for the crossing.

By the 1870s Lucker had freight handling facilities both to the north-west and south-east of the level crossing. On the down side, north-west of the crossing, were four sidings trailing from the main line, two of which served the coal depot.  The goods loading bank and associated sidings were south-east of the crossing on the up side, but there was no goods shed. The Railway Clearing House Handbook of stations (1904) indicates that Lucker could handle the normal full range of goods traffic and was equipped with a 15cwt capacity yard crane. In 1913 NER data refers to barley and livestock as the main goods traffic handled; unusually for northern Northumberland there was no stone traffic.

In March 1898 troughs were installed north of Lucker to enable locomotives of express trains to take up water while travelling at speed, rather than spending idle time at a station using a water crane. With the demise of steam haulage in the 1960s they were taken out of use on 18 August 1969 and subsequently dismantled. One of the photos in the gallery below shows the troughs in place in 1955.

Lucker station did not attract any residential, commercial or industrial development, and in 1911 its catchment area had a population of only 734. In that year 5,567 tickets were issued, over twice the total of neighbouring Newham but nevertheless a low figure in the days before competition from road transport. The train service shown in the North Eastern Railway timetable for winter 1912-13 appears generous for a station which had relatively few passengers:

# Limited stop train
The first northbound departure of the day is shown to run as far as Beal; this train waited at Beal for about half-an-hour, moving off the main line to enable a northbound express to call, before completing its journey to Berwick. Passengers on the 10.19am ex-Lucker could change at Belford or Beal to catch this faster train to Berwick or onward to Edinburgh.

In 1923 the North Eastern Railway ceased to exist and its assets became part of the new London & North Eastern Railway. As an economy measure this little-used station ceased to have its own stationmaster and by the mid 1930s was supervised by Belford. It is likely that the LNER replaced NER nameboards with its own, but no photographic evidence has been seen to support this. The winter 1937-38 timetable, below, shows a similar frequency of trains to the 1912-13 service, except that there was no longer an augmented Saturday service.

Lucker was one of the stations on the ECML in northern Northumberland which closed to passengers on 5 May 1941; elsewhere in Great Britain closures during World War II were uncommon. However  a working timetable effective from 5 May 1941 shows that  a down news/parcels train called at Lucker, and from this date until at least 6 May 1946 there was one call daily northbound and one Saturday-only to set down southbound.  The station reopened on 7 October 1946, but on weekdays only. Lucker became part of the nationalised British Railways’ North Eastern Region on 1 January 1948. The first regional timetable (from 31 May 1948) showed an infrequent weekday-only service with up departures for Newcastle at 7.52am and 5.31pm and down calls at 9.31am (Berwick) and 5.37pm (Edinburgh). In the final summer timetable for summer 1952, below, the up late afternoon departure has been discontinued:

In 1951 Lucker station sold only 277 tickets – about one per day. Its closure to passengers on 2 February 1953 will have caused little inconvenience to the local populace. Goods traffic continued to be dealt with until 7 June 1965.

The passenger platforms at Lucker were removed c1959 and the station building outlasted them for only a short time. It is regrettable that the fine building was demolished in summer 1960, but fortunate that the NER’s historian Ken Hoole was on hand to photograph the vandalism (as seen in the gallery below).  The signal box remained in use, with a new frame at the back of the cabin installed in 1959. The box was decommissioned on 20 August 1978, barriers having replaced gates at the level crossing several weeks earlier, on 3 June. Chathill signal box took over supervision of the crossing by CCTV when Lucker box closed. At Lucker the stone base of the signal box survives as a relay room, and the goods loading bank is extant on the opposite side of the tracks.

Click here for a brief history of the East Coast Main Line
in Northumberland.

Route maps drawn by Alan Young. Tickets from Michael Stewart.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Addyman, John F (Editor) A history of the Newcastle & Berwick Railway (North Eastern Railway Association, 2011) – especially Chapter 5 ‘The buildings’ by Bill Fawcett
• Biddle, Gordon Victorian stations (David & Charles, 1973)
• Fawcett, Bill A history of North Eastern Railway architecture Vol 1: The Pioneers (North Eastern Railway Association 2001)
• Young, Alan Railways in Northumberland (Martin Bairstow, 2003)
• Quick, Michael   Railway passenger stations in Great Britain: a chronology (RCTS 2009)
• Clinker, C R    Clinker’s register of closed passenger stations and goods depots (Avon Anglia 1978)

See other ECML stations:
Tweedmouth, Scremerston, Goswick, Beal, Smeafield, Crag Mill, Belford, Newham, Fallodon, Christon Bank, Little Mill, Longhoughton, Lesbury, Warkworth, Longhirst, Ashington Colliery Junction, Morpeth, Stannington, Plessey, Annitsford (1st), Annitsford (2nd), Killingworth, Forest Hall, Heaton (2nd), Heaton (1st), Durham, Croft Spa, Eryholme, Otterington, Alne & Tollerton