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The Mid Suffolk Light Railway was built at the turn of this century to serve the villages, and agriculture of Mid Suffolk. The terminus of the MLSR, or ‘Middy’ as it was affectionately called, was at Haughley Junction, where the station was enlarged in 1903 to cope with this additional role. The MLSR was a standard gauge railway built to take light traffic from Haughley to Mendlesham, Brockford, Kenton, Aspall and Laxfield. The railway opened in 1904 and was extended for freight only to Cratfield in 1906. The original idea was to push the line across to Southwold, providing a link from the Midlands through to the North Sea at Southwold. It was also to join with the East Suffolk Railway, which ran via Debenham and Otley to Ipswich, but these links were never built.

The terminus at Haughley Junction was supposed to be a combined station but the Great Eastern Railway quoted such an enormous price for the proposed modifications that the Middy actually built its own station building a little to the north of the existing building. Officially the stations were named Haughley West for the GER and Haughley East for the MLSR. At first sight the Middy station appeared to be a brick building but it was actually constructed of zinc sheets on a timber frame and painted to look like brickwork - rather like an old Hornby tin-plate model station!
After just 6 years the branch was already in decline and the extension to Cratfield was closed. Originally there were cattle docks provided at every station except Haughley, but these also fell into disuse as agriculture turned from cattle to corn. In World War l, part of the link to Kenton and Debenham, which had been started, was lifted because the materials were more urgently needed elsewhere and this effectively ended any hopes of completing the original scheme. The line was never to be a profitable enterprise and when, along with the Great Eastern Railway, it was swallowed up by the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) in 1924, it remained virtually independent within the new grouping, simply because the LNER did not want to take it on. The only economy that they did eventually insist on was the closure of the MLSR Haughley East Station and the centralisation of the operation on the old GER station in November 1939. The original MLSR station was flattened.
The line started from Haughley with an exacting climb up a 1 in 43 gradient. Although this was a considerable challenge to both engine and driver, it was more of a worry on the down trip. A ‘runaway’ on the final section before the terminus at Haughley could never have been stopped and there was always the potential for a train to crash through the terminus at Haughley, or onto the mainline. Strict limits on the weight of trains were imposed to try to avoid an accident; up trains were allowed to haul 21 wagons, but the down trains were limited to 14. Nevertheless, there are several recorded incidents of a train overshooting the station and occasionally the buffer stop at Haughley; fortunately none was serious.
At first the MLSR provided a freight and passenger service three times a week. In the sugar beet season the freight service was increased to a daily service and often mixed freight and passenger trains were run. However, from 1920 a daily service, with three, and later four trains a day (one on Sundays) in each direction was introduced mainly to carry children to school. The Middy never lost its light railway, branch-line character. There were just two signals on the entire line and the level crossing gates between Haughley and Laxfield were opened and closed by the train crews themselves. The journey from Laxfield was timetabled to take between 64 and 75 minutes.

The Middy survived the nationalisation of 1948 but only for another 4 years, to 1952. Because of the light construction, it did not take long for nature and agriculture to reclaim the track bed once operations had stopped. Within just a few years it was almost impossible to trace the route of the track from Haughley, although the keen map-reader and observer might still be able to find traces of it here and there. A preservation society has now been set up, based at Brockford. Here the original Brockford Station building, found at Old Newton, has been re-assembled, some track has been re-laid and other relics are being collected. The station buildings from Horham and Laxfield are preserved at Mangapps Farm Railway Museum in Essex.

Howard Stephens

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