Scug doodles!!

The Cronk & Harwick Railway: The Railway to Insanity

The Cronk & Harwick Railway Is one of those bits of RWS lore which I find really interesting, mainly because we know so little about it, which leaves plenty of room for headcanon. But before diving into any of that, let's see what the IOS book has to say about Harwick and its railway.

So first of all, based on the name of this railway, was the original plan to try to build the line all the way to Cronk? Because that is a pretty long distance for a railway located in probably the most off the beaten path part of the entire island, and which, presumably, was never all that financially prosperous.

Secondly, the railway was horse drawn. I’m going to change this for my own headcanon, and instead say the railway switched to steam engines somewhere around the beginning of the 1900s. I’m not entirely sure what I want their locomotive fleet to be specifically, but I wonder if one of the Sodor and Mainland’s box tanks could have ended up here. In any case I imagine the engines of this line are a hodgepodge of second, third, or even fourth hand engines of ridiculously antiquated designs, all held together with duct tape and prayers! Also, I think it would be fitting for the C&H to at some point acquire a pair of railmotors similar to ones used on Colonel Stephens’ light railways.

Finally, the line was apparently pulled up for scrap at some point during World War II. I would like to propose that instead of being truly scrapped, whoever the owner of this railway was actually pulled off the biggest con in the island's history! Let me explain.

During World War II the British Government wanted to tear up the old line for scrap metal to serve the war effort. The owner sold the tracks to them, but at a cost significantly higher than what they were actually worth. He kept possession of the railways right-of-way however. The railways engines were also supposed to be scrapped, but the owner claimed they had been completely destroyed by a German bomber, and pointed to the railways’ blown up sheds as proof. It was a bit weird that only the sheds had been hit… and that no one had either seen or heard any planes overhead… and that the Cregwir Quarry coincidently “misplaced” some several boxes of dynamite the night before, which were never found. However, there was a war on, and frankly, the military had more pressing matters to deal with than the sketchy behavior of a disused backwater railway which was going to be torn up anyway.

So the line was scrapped, and for the remainder of the war nothing particularly unusual happened around Harwick. The naval base which had been established there was small, and only ever housed a handful of small coastal patrol vessels, the crews of which never really ventured far out of the town. But shortly after the war had ended, and the Royal Navy was out of sight, strange things began to occur on railways all over the island. The NWR had begun a program of repairing and relaying their tracks, which had become worn out during the war. At works sites all across the railway, several segments of old rails and sleepers, which had been taken up during the day, began to go missing in the night. A shipment of bricks for the rebuilding of some of the NWR’s goods sheds conspicuously never arrived, and the Skarloey Railway reported that a small stockpile of slate seemed to have simply vanished. On the Mid Sodor Railway, the long abandoned Mountain Road, which had its rails and sleepers removed in the late 30s, was mysteriously stripped clean of all its remaining ballast. The Mid Sodor, however, was too busy going bankrupt at the time to really take much notice.

Up in Harwick however, a remarkable rebirth had occurred, with rails once again running alongside the river all the way to Cregwir. Also, as it turned out, the death of the line's old engines had been greatly exaggerated, and they were found (due to some clerical error no doubt) to have instead been stored in a disused mine-shaft up at Cregwir, where they had miraculously remained in good working order (or atleast, good by the standards of the C&H, which wasn’t saying much). The revitalized railway had even built a brand new engine shed to replace the one which had been destroyed, made of bricks and complete with a slate roof… yeah…

Nothing could ever be proven however, and so the Cronk & Harwick Railway was back! Needless to say, the NWR and the Skarloey refused to ever do business with the revitalized railway. When asked by Awdry during his research The Fat Controller refused to even admit the railway was still in existence, hence why it’s marked as abandoned on most maps, if it's even marked at all! It's possible that one of the reasons the NWR never extended up to Harwick is because doing so would have almost certainly meant having to deal with the C&H. 

Despite this, the C&H has continued to survive. How? Well, that’s a question which many have asked, but it has become accepted wisdom on Sodor that you should not go looking for an explanation. For those who have tried have all ended up becoming obsessed and throwing themselves head first into their research, isolating themselves from society and wasting further and further away. Until they finally re-emerge from their studies into the outside world, having gone completely insane after finally concluding that logic and sanity had simply given up on the Cronk & Harwick and that so too must they give up on logic and sanity!

Since then the railway has led a mostly uneventful life (at least by Sodor’s standards), though it is still as ramshackle an operation as ever, and there have periodically been rumors of the old owner hiding stores of cash and maybe even some gold in the surrounding caves! Again, nothing has ever been proven, and the old owner has since been succeeded by his daughter, who has a slightly better reputation. Needless to say though, the railway has certainly lived up to its long standing nickname of The Old Crooked and Horrible! In recent years they’ve even taken to flying the Jolly Roger over their definitely not stolen engine shed!