As generations of fine-limbed thoroughbreds pranced on and off the trains at Newmarket’s original railway station, almost unnoticed, their working class cousins were shifting around the waggons which carried them to racecourses all over the country.

Railway horses had been part of the country’s transport history for decades and given Newmarket’s centuries-long association with the equine it will come as no surprise that it was where the last of them worked the lines.

It was on February 21 1967 that Charlie, the last of the country’s working railway horses, shunted his own horsebox onto the train taking him from Newmarket to retirement pastures in Somerset, where he had been foaled, after 18 years working on the railway.

Then 24, he had started his service aged six as a shunt horse at Camden Town goods yard in London before being transferred first to Birmingham, then to Bolton, Bristol and Liverpool before heading to East Anglia, first to Diss and finally to Newmarket.

His driver was the late Lol Kelly of Exning who, interviewed by the Journal more than 30 years ago, remembered in particular when he and Charlie shared the limelight as they were invited to join the parade of personalities at the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley.

“He was in the box next to Stroller who had won an Olympic silver medal with Marion Coakes and they were the stars of the show,” said Lol. “But far more people brought food for Charlie.”

Manchester-born Lol had arrived in Newmarket in 1924 as a 14-year-old apprentice jockey to trainer Percy Peck, then based at Harraton House in Exning. He later joined Walter Earl but in 1939 when war broke out he joined the Lancashire Fusiliers. After the war he went back into racing but a fall saw him seriously injure his shoulder and he went to work on the railway. He soon got a job as a shunt horse driver at Newmarket. “When I started there nearly all the horses still travelled by train to race meetings and most of the mares and foals and yearlings coming to Newmarket to the studs or for the sales came by train,” he said.

Lol worked with a number of horses on the line but his favourite was Butch who retired two years before Charlie in 1965 and who Lol accompanied on his 15- hour train journey from Newmarket to retirement in Somerset. “I talked to him all the way and fed him sweets and dandelions and it was heading back to Newmarket on my own that I realised just how much I was going to miss him,” said Lol.

The plan was that all three of Newmarket’s last shunt horses would live out their days in the west country but the grey Tommy was not so lucky. Val Goodchild, daughter of his shunt driver Alfred ‘Mick’ Newton remembered. “The horses were his pride and joy ,” she said. “He took him to the Horse of the Year Show in 1961 and we were all there in the audience watching. Dad was so proud he never dreamed he would have an opportunity like that.”

But soon after his Wembley appearance Tommy collapsed while pulling a waggon and died in harness. “Dad was devastated,” said Val

With Tommy gone and Butch retired the workload for Lol and Charlie dwindled as the Newmarket goods station, which once stood where Armstrong Close is today, had run its course, a far cry from the days when the shunters used to load 200 horseboxes a day.

When it came time for Charlie to bid farewell to the railway, Harry Pringle, the town’s corn merchant left him a parting gift at the station gate, a sack of oats, a bunch of carrots, a bale of hay and horse cubes to sustain him on the long journey to Somerset and retirement.

“I always be proud of Charlie,” said Lol. “I am conscious of the years of hard work put in by many thousands of other railway horses and their drivers. They did the work unnoticed. But Charlie, God bless him, he’ll never been forgotten. He was truly the last of the line.”

As the last horse to work the railways it is fitting that a plaque is now in situ on Newmarket’s Railway to commemorate the gentle giant along with an interpretation board detailing the town’s railway history, as part of the national Railway 200 celebrations.

By kind permission of Alison Hayes, Newmarket Journal