Hemel Hempstead: Former Duckhall railway embankment

Image: © Nigel Cox Taken: 2 Jun 2010

Anyone driving or walking along London Road in Two Waters might be intrigued by a short length of wooded embankment stretching northwards across Bulborne Meadows from the road towards the town centre of Hemel Hempstead. It is in fact a former railway embankment and one of the few surviving artefacts in Hemel of the former Harpenden to Hemel Hempstead railway line, the so-called Nicky Line. As with many Victorian infill cross country railway lines its history is mired in a morass of land ownership issues, failing companies and takeovers, and rapid changes in demand. Briefly the line was originally built by a company partially owned by the London & North Western Railway (LNWR), linking the LNWR's Boxmoor station (the current Hemel Hempstead station) with Hemel Hempstead town centre and then Harpenden. The line failed commercially and was taken over by the Midland Railway (MR). However the LNWR then did not want the MR taking over their traffic and the connection at Boxmoor was, if not physically disconnected, shall we say "discouraged". Consequently the MR built a station called Heath Park Halt just south of where the Kodak building is now, and this was, for all practical purposes, the end of the MR's passenger route from Harpenden. However this embankment, which is between the former Boxmoor and Heath Park Halt stations, was kept in use by the MR to provide a railway access to the Duckhall gasworks on the south side of London Road. With the coming of the Nationalisation of the railways in 1948 the connection at Boxmoor was formally reinstated, and coal traffic to Duckhall via Boxmoor was reinstated, but the line only survived another 11 years before being dismantled.

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