2012: The Passing of Centenarian whose Life was Devoted to Railroads

October 4, 2012

Bernard Holden, whose long life was devoted to railroads in a variety of contexts, died at the age of 104 in the English village and civil parish of Ditchling. Fittingly enough, he had been born in 1908 in the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway station house in the village of Barcombe along what was a section of the Bluebell Railway line. 

Holden came from a family very immersed in the railroad business; his father was the station master at Barcombe and his grandfather and great-grandfather were likewise railway men. Holden followed in their footsteps by starting work with the Southern Railway as a ballast train clerk.

With the outbreak of World War II, Holden ended up in London. It was there that he supervised both the evacuation of children from that city to safer areas and the large-scale return of Allied soldiers from the German siege of Dunkirk in France. During the London Blitz, Holden worked hard to keep the local trains running on still-operable routes and away from damaged tracks even as Luftwaffe bombings were regularly shutting down a number of those lines. 

Holden’s other wartime rail duties included service in the faraway Indian subcontinent’s region of Bengal, where he focused on supplying British troops in Burma (present-day Myanmar) who were battling Japanese forces there. Holden invested considerable time and energy in operating railways in northern India that transported troops and supplies to the warfront. 

After the war, Holden resumed his civilian career and worked for British Railways for nearly a quarter-century before retiring. Another one of his other noteworthy post-war endeavors involved helping to launch the Bluebell Railway heritage line, which became the the world’s first preserved standard gauge steam-operated passenger railway to operate a public service. Holden ultimately became president of this enterprise, and his funeral cortege included a nine-mile (14.5-kilometer) ride via the Blue Bell Railway. (The accompanying photo of one this railway’s trains was taken in 2016.)

Photo Credit: Peter Trimming (https://www.flickr.com/people/55426027@N03) from Croydon, England – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license at  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

For more information on Bernard Holden, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Holden

Additional information on the Bluebell Railway is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Holden