In March 1959 Charles Hudson saw an advertisement in the Brighton Evening Argus for a meeting to consider the formation of a Lewes and East Grinstead Railway Preservation Society. Arriving after the meeting had started, he sat in the back row of the hall. At the end of the meeting the newly appointed membership secretary set up a table immediately behind Charles and thus he was ideally placed to turn round in his seat and place his pound on the table in exchange for receipt No. 1, making him the first fully paid up member of what, at the next meeting, would become the Bluebell Railway Preservation Society.
After an electrical engineering apprenticeship, he decided to become an ambulance driver, a vocation he followed for six years until electrical engineering reclaimed him, and he began a career in signalling with British Rail while already volunteering on the Bluebell. Charles immediately set to work making good the inherited signalling apparatus at Sheffield Park to satisfy the inspector to grant a Light Railway Order and open Britain’s first preserved full-size passenger-carrying railway for business in August 1960.
He set about overhauling what the Bluebell inherited once it reached Horsted Keynes, then establishing and obtaining what it needed for he was in an excellent position to be aware of and bid for any signalling equipment which British Rail was replacing with more modern technology, back then for not much more than a scrap ticket, and the Bluebell benefited hugely from this very convenient arrangement over the years.
Charles oversaw the complete and complex mechanical and electrical re-signalling scheme at Horsted Keynes signal box prior to the railway extending to Kingscote. Here he was able to lead a team to install an historically important Southern Region ‘L’ frame Westinghouse arrangement by obtaining enough of a mixed pedigree of suitable parts from the Dartmouth Railway and the National Railway Museum Collection among others. This box was commissioned in 2016 and will eventually also control the layout at East Grinstead and its current gated interface with Network Rail. Charles is also planning for the replacement of the time-served signalling arrangements back at Sheffield Park, using the frame from the recently decommissioned Newhaven Town signal box.
Charles was awarded an MBE in November 1996 for services to St John Ambulance and in 2021 he received a special award from the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers in recognition of his contribution to minor railways signalling for over 60 years. In his time with the Bluebell he has served on the Society’s management committee for more than 55 years, and as a trustee for about the same length of time. That must amount to many hundreds of committee meetings, and he still attends monthly meetings as an interested vice president.
Heading the S&T Department for more than 60 years and ensuring a safe environment for the railway’s operation, the contribution made by Charles Hudson to creating the Bluebell Railway we know today cannot be overstated, and he is after more than half a century of service an extremely worthy winner of this award.
