In memory of Daddy Long-legs

When it opened in the winter of 1896, Brighton’s most improbable railway was not yet universally known as the Daddy Long-legs. Its promoters preferred Volk’s Electric Sea Car - a name that stressed novelty and maritime glamour rather than the prosaic fact that it ran on rails. Formally incorporated as the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway, it took only weeks for the public to supply a nickname that proved impossible to dislodge.

The line was the creation of Magnus Volk, already established with his electric railway along Brighton’s seafront (see this blog’s very first article - Whistle, hoot, whistle). Extending that system eastwards on land meant costly engineering through unstable cliffs. Volk’s solution was to avoid the cliffs altogether by placing the railway in the sea. Between 1894 and 1896, standard-gauge track was laid directly onto the seabed, fixed to concrete sleepers drilled into the chalk in the shallows between Brighton and Rottingdean.

The single passenger vehicle - officially named Pioneer - was neither boat nor tram but an uneasy hybrid. A large saloon carriage sat high above the water on four long steel legs, each mounted on a wheeled bogie that followed the submerged rails. Electric power was supplied by overhead wires mounted on poles set into the seabed, an arrangement that worked tolerably in calm conditions and poorly in rough seas. Because it operated offshore, the Sea Car was treated partly as a vessel and was required to carry maritime safety equipment and a qualified sea captain on board.

The railway opened to the public on 28 November 1896, making this winter the 129th anniversary of its launch. Its debut was dramatic and inauspicious. Within days, a severe storm capsized the carriage. Volk rebuilt it with longer legs and raised electrical gear, and services resumed in 1897. For a short time, the Sea Car functioned as intended, carrying thousands of passengers on what was marketed as a ‘sea voyage on wheels’.

The English Channel, however, proved an unforgiving environment for fixed infrastructure. Tides, wave action and shifting shingle scoured around the track supports, while new groynes and coastal works altered sediment movement along the bay. Maintenance became constant and costly. Plans to divert the route further offshore to avoid new sea defences proved financially impossible, and by 1901 the railway was dismantled and abandoned.

What survives today is not rail but footprint. The metalwork was removed for scrap, but the concrete sleepers and seabed fixings were left in place. These remains are normally buried beneath sand and shingle. Only on exceptionally low spring tides, often in winter and only for a brief window around slack water, can parts of the alignment sometimes be made out as a faint, ruler-straight line beneath the surface east of the Palace Pier.

Seen then, the Daddy Long-legs ceases to be a cartoonish curiosity and becomes something more exacting: a measurable line in the landscape, briefly legible, marking the moment when Brighton attempted to extend its electric railway not along the shore - but straight through the sea.

Sources: National Railway Museum, Volks Electric Railway Association and My Brighton and Hove. The top image is courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, and the other two can be found at Wikipedia.