Haywards Heath; Sunday, 21 April, 2024

Not quite such an early start to the day as I only needed to catch the bus at 09:50, but given this is a Sunday and there was only a bus every 2-hours, it was quite important that I made that one.

The bus took me round to the Station at Horsted Keynes (although the better description would be the railway station about 1.5 miles away from the village of the same name). Horsted Keynes was a major junction on a series of railways which criss-crossed the north of Sussex forming vital links and diversion routes. At one point trains ran north to East Grinsted and onto London and south to both Lewes direct and the Brighton Main Line at Haywards Heath. But that all came to an end with the slow withdrawal of services from the late 50’s into the mid-60s as the Beeching Axe cut the line south of East Grinsted (fun fact, Richard Beeching lived in East Grinsted – strange his local station survived…)

However, the line refused to die and within 3 years of the line closing it was open again, this time as a heritage railway running steam trains for tourists – the first operating example in the UK and pretty much the blueprint for the rest of the Heritage Railway sector which grew up on the back of all the line closures. Today the Bluebell Railway is the granddaddy of Heritage lines, and a major Sussex tourist attraction in it’s own right.

The timing of the bus meant that I had about 40 minutes to spare at Horsted Keynes to have a look around the large station (it was the junction of the line coming south from East Grinstead splitting to go southeast towards Sheffield Park and Lewes or southwest towards Ardingly and Haywards Heath), including the heritage railways carriage works. Pretty much on time a whistle in the distance announced the arrival of the first departure of the morning from Sheffield Park towards East Grinstead so I headed over to the platform and boarded the train north.

There was a 20 minute turn around at East Grinstead, the most recent addition to the railway with the line reopening to here in 2013, including the recreation of the link to the National Railway network, in theory allowing for trains to run through towards London again – not that they do. The Bluebell station is a small platform located south of the 2010s rebuilt National Rail station, so there isn’t actually much to see here. Back on the train then and heading south to do the complete line back to Sheffield Park.

The line between Sheffield Park and just south of Horsted Keynes was the first to reopen in 1960 and consequently Sheffield Park is home to the locomotive works and museum for the line. On this Sunday afternoon it was also the starting point for the Golden Arrow Pullman service which was occupying the other platform when we arrived, so I waited for that to depart before having a quick look around the station and then heading out to my third National Trust property of the weekend.

Sheffield Park House is a gothic country house, which is still in private ownership, but in a series of purchases between 1954 and 2007 the National Trust has managed to purchase most of the rest of the estate, including the formal gardens which were originally laid out by Capability Brown, which are open to wander around.

I spent a good couple of hours wandering around the gardens, as well as popping into the café for a final National Trust Scone of the weekend, before it was time to head back to the station to catch the train back to East Grinstead and pick up the bus back to Haywards Heath.

Or at least that was the plan, but the Bluebell Railway has managed to expertly recreate the Southern Railway experience, which included a lengthy delay waiting for a late running Golden Arrow to get back to Sheffield Park and then further random delays up the line, which meant I finally arrived into East Grinsted 20 minutes after the last bus of the day back to Haywards Heath had departed. Thankfully I’d already had a plan B which required catching a later bus over to Three Bridges and picking up the train there south to Haywards Heath. In the end I was only back to the hotel about 20 minutes after I would otherwise have been.

I grabbed my bag and headed back to the station with time to spare for my train back home.