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Hatton Station - Part Two
One little tale about the triangular junction at Hatton from
my father and mother. Shortly after WW2 the railway was transporting a load of
bananas - probably one of the first into the country after, as my father puts
it, "the recent hostilities". Unfortunately the refrigeration equipment on the
ship had been faulty, and the whole trainload spoiled in the railway wagons.
Somebody, somewhere, in the railway officialdom decided that the best way of
getting rid of them was to tip them in the middle of the triangular junction at
Hatton and cover them with earth.
As dad says, the junction is the size of a football pitch,
just about, and it was pretty filled up with rotting bananas and earth. Anyway,
the inevitable happened - the lot fermented, and there was probably spontaneous
combustion going on. Large amounts of steam and, periodically, smoke started
erupting. The railway authorities contacted the local fire brigade who ran
hosepipes from the local canal, under the embankment, into the massive pile of
decomposing bananas in the hope of solving the problem and cooling it down.
Wrong move!
The fermentation going on went mad - a bit like having
porridge on the boil. In fact the fermentation went on for years afterwards - a
fresh fall of rain, and it would be off again - with plumes of smoke and steam,
and ghastly aromatic smells wafting round the area, and warning signs leaning
over to one side as things festered violently underneath them. Mum remarked
that the smell was appalling - she knew the story firsthand, living in
Leamington. Dad, who had to go up and down the line when he was on National
Service, picked it up from a local - he was puzzled as to why this area was
forever belching steam, smoke and pongs. Now this - fiasco - happened, they
think, in the late 40s. It was still bubbling merrily away in the mid 50s. I've
no idea how long it would have continued.
It would appear to be a story that was well known in the
area at the time, but which has since been long forgotten. Suffice to say that
they never asked biologists about the rationale of the disposal scheme. One
biologist I told it to could see what was coming and fell about laughing before
we got to the culmination - then pointed out that the pongs would have
consisted of various alcohols, ethylene and god knows what! She also pointed
out that if you put a steel bar in a compost heap of 1 metre cube and pull it
out, the end will be too hot to touch, so she'd hate to think what temperature
this heap would have got up to.
Kevin Jones
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Hatton Station
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