Evocotive railway remains, what derelect or abandoned structure stirs your emotions?

[DLT]

Whatever your favourites are, they may well be featured in the lovingly produced Disused Stations Website here:  http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/

Not just a valuable historic resource, but a highly recomended way to waste a few hours wallowing in historic nostalgia!

Enjoy,

Dave.

[jamie92208]

For me it's standing on the towpath of the Calder and Hebble canal at Dewsbury looking at the viaduct that took the Midland's West Riding Lines to their terminus at Saville Town Goods yard and imagining what might have been if the whole line had been built and imagining a gleaming Compound at the head of a rake of Clerestories. I'll try and find a photo.

 

Jamie

[PhilJ W]

Romford (GE) goods yard is now long gone but the bridge that carried the 1 in 25 incline down into the yard still spans Waterloo Road is still there butting up to the main line bridge. The archway beneath the up end of the platforms that connected the yard to the brewery is also still there.

Edited June 10, 2014 by PhilJ W

[beast66606]

I visited the site of Belah viaduct, on the old Stainforth line, last year. I am thinking about a repeat visit this year - would love to have seen the viaduct before demolition, such a dramatic location.  

 

Graham 

 

I scaled the hills and visited the old signal box there, back in the mid 1980s. The view from the edge of the viaduct was incredible.

[NXEC Craig]

I'm a guard who works between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. There are so many parts of the route I wish I could have seen in it's heyday. I love trying to follow the derelict lines which are now covered in trees and overgrowth. I am especially interested in the Rosyth Dock Branch which stems off just south of Inverkeithing station but is currently mothballed. Other interesting areas are Ladybank junction and also Aberdeen Ferryhill. There still seems to be quite a few structures still in place such as old platforms, goods sheds, and bridges. If only I had a time machine

[Donw]

The Forest of Dean is full of old railway lines but finding the stone blocks for a tramway turnoout in situ near Mushet Iron Works was special. Also walking the curve near Speculation which is as close to the end curves on many layouts as I have seen.

Don

['CHARD]

I'm a guard who works between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. There are so many parts of the route I wish I could have seen in it's heyday. I love trying to follow the derelict lines which are now covered in trees and overgrowth. I am especially interested in the Rosyth Dock Branch which stems off just south of Inverkeithing station but is currently mothballed. Other interesting areas are Ladybank junction and also Aberdeen Ferryhill. There still seems to be quite a few structures still in place such as old platforms, goods sheds, and bridges. If only I had a time machine

 

Kirkcaldy Harbour branch too, only wee, but the incline and operating practices lent it a truly fascinating air.

[plarailfan]

The Low Moor to Dudley Hill line, at Bierley, on the outskirts of Bradford stirs my imagination - it closed in 1917 after only 24 years of use !

There's very little on the internet about this line and here are the remains of a bridge across the very rural, Shetcliffe Lane.   https://www.flickr.com/photos/41294071@N02/11029720456/in/photolist-

[Eggesford box]

Never new it when it was open but the remains at Dunford Bridge on the Woodhead line when I went around there in the mid eighties

[dagrizz]

 

 

1. The GC bridges over the M1 south of Leicester and M69 south of Rugby - is the one at Ashby Magna still there, I know the M69's is.

 

 

'Chard, I think you mean the M45 bridge south of Rugby. Both are still there. You can't walk over the M1 bridge, they've blocked it off. You can walk the M45 bridge though.

 

 

Graham 

[Axlebox]

dagrizz, on 10 Jun 2014 - 08:11, said:

I visited the site of Belah viaduct, on the old Stainforth line, last year. I am thinking about a repeat visit this year - would love to have seen the viaduct before demolition, such a dramatic location.  

 

Graham 

 

I scaled the hills and visited the old signal box there, back in the mid 1980s. The view from the edge of the viaduct was incredible.

 

 

...how about the very last section of Belah viaduct which the local farmer still uses to cross the Belah Beck...down, but not quite out.

Duncan

['CHARD]

Oh that's reminded me.  Wadsley Bridge as it clung to life for football specials only.  Unless I'm very much mistaken it retained its signalbox looking in a decidedly woebegone state. 

 

Derelict signalboxes are one of the remains that really do it for me.  Shankend again I first encountered derelict (now a wild and windswept holiday let), Potters Lane in Wednesbury, and these days the boarded up box at Fosseway crossing on the Lichfield - Walsall line.

['CHARD]

'Chard, I think you mean the M45 bridge south of Rugby. Both are still there. You can't walk over the M1 bridge, they've blocked it off. You can walk the M45 bridge though.

 

M45C.jpg

 

Graham 

 

I knew M69 didn;t look right, M45 at Dunchurch, you're absolutely right.   Lovely bit of poetry along the right parapet, reads like a goth lyric.

 

I never walked the bridge although the stretch nearer town I've strolled several times, when on residential events at the nearby Alstom (was Metro-Cammell) posh retreat.

Edited June 10, 2014 by 'CHARD

[Torn-on-the-platform]

The buildings of the Moretonhampstead branch are largely still extant and much of the track bed is traceable. It really is a beautiful valley with great potential for tourism, and this has caught my imagination - I'm not even a Western man. As I have mentioned, probably too many times, on RMWeb before, Moretonhampstead as if preserved is my plan for when I have the money and space to build it!

 

Princetown is a similar concept for me, though less buildings remain. The line itself is too steep for preservationists to have considered viable - one coach trains with medium sized locos is unlikely to be sustainable and therefore it isn't suitable for my plans, but I'm sure that Princetown-style trains will make cameo appearances on my future layout. As you walk along the line into Princetown itself, the feel of the railway is very much still there - its not too difficult to imagine a 45xx up there!

 

My other two suggestions are also in the West Country, but have a Southern flavour. The Camel Trail as a whole is fantastic, and the platforms along the route used to really interest me as a child, and the fact that you may actually see a steam loco at Boscarne made it even easier for the imagination to run wild. The real attraction though is the bridge over Petherick Creek, just outside Padstow - it used to seem so huge! Finally, a special mention to the viaduct at Meldon - a very impressive structure with amazing views in both directions. How good would it be to see a Builleid pacific run over it once again?!

[Pacific231G]

This is probably OT because it's not in Britain but, because of a legal distinction between closure and formal abandonment, it is fairly common for closed lines in France to retain their track and slowly decay into the countryside unless the route is wanted for roads or cycletracks. The most evocative is of course the Petite Ceinture in Paris but in 1996 II found a very sad example on the closed southern section of the Blanc-Argent narrow gauge line in deepest France south of the Loire. This was near a place called Ecueille where I'd seen a goods train running just ten years earlier. The bullhead rails were still intact though a bit rusty but the chairs were resting on fairly rotten sleepers and young trees were growing up between the rails. It was all terribly sad and the only trains that would ever run there again would be in the imagination.

 

Or so I thought. Seven years  later I was looking at the same length of track only this time from the end platform of a passing train. It just shows how much a really energetic and determined preservation group can achieve. Since my previous visit - when moves were already quietly taking placet- they'd felled the trees, cleared the vegetation and organised the replacement of 4500 sleepers (about one in three) Ironically before they could actually run trains they'd had to have the line formally abandoned so that the route could be bought from the state by a syndicate of local towns who were definitely in favour of a Train Touristique in their very quiet corner of the countryside.

 

Perchance they are not dead but merely sleeping till we have need of them again.  

[Rugd1022]

I'm in the never-was camp. I have always loved the abandoned, never-completed 1930s arches in a field north of Edgware that would have taken the Northern Line on to Bushey Heath, maybe Watford Market. Caught my imagination as a teenager, still do it for me now.

 

Likewise for me with the very short but still extant stretch of trackbed near Bishops Itchington on the Banbury - Leamington line that was aimed towards Rugby, it was as far as the long defunct Oxford & Rugby Railway Co. ever got. The Great Western stepped in, diverted the route via Leamington and that was the end of it. The track bed itself veers off for about three hundred yards or so and peters out in the middle of a field!

 

Until it's very sad demise, the famous 'Birdcage' GCR girder bridge which spanned the WCML at Rugby held a high place in my affections, I still find it hard to accept that it's gone even now. As a nipper, my Dad and his mates used to race across it as a dare between trains, and six decades later I was there to see it being removed and cut up on site... what stories that bridge could tell....

Edited June 10, 2014 by Rugd1022

[Nedrahn]

(Steps on soapbox.)

 

Folkestone Harbour and Folkestone Harbour Branch. Served Great Britain through two world wars, withstood the might of the Third Reich, now derelict and to be destroyed by a millionaire and his loyal Conservative council, with the utterly feckless opposition (sic) cheering them on. No more ferries. No more trains to the harbour. No voice for the many who want the harbour saved. Lots more seaside apartments for the grasping rich. 

 

(Steps off soapbox.)

[edcayton]

The Treffry viaduct in the Luxulyan valley on the Newquay line. Well worth the scramble up the valley side and hope you catch a clay train below.  It's a wonderful place to be even if you don't see a train.

 

Ed

[APOLLO]

Posted before - but - what a waste.

 

 

Hadfield, looking towards Woodhead & Sheffield.

 

Brit15

[John B]

The earthworks of the completed but never opened Cromarty branch in the Highlands;

Connel Ferry bridge, as already mentioned earlier;

Remnants of the slate quarries and tracks on the remote island of Easdale;

Shawford viaduct on the DN&S, which always seemed to be mocking the thousands of road users stuck in traffic by the infamous traffic lights, before they blasted the M3 through Twyford Down;

Kiplingcotes Station on the Beverley - York line: the absurdity of a station in the middle of nowhere, serving only the local Lord, and a few farms, yet almost perfectly intact, sans track. Many times I walked from there, all you had to do was let the imagination run riot;

Tracks in the sand, and stray bits of concrete, remnants of the Spurn Head Railway.

[Jon Fitness]

The surviving platform at Merstone Junction on the Isle of Wight does it for me. I would have loved to have been a signalman there back in the day.

Another one on the island is at the new Smallbrook Junction...if you peer over the fence between the two platforms you can see the the concrete base of the original Smallbrook signalbox which must have been a mad place to work on a 1950s summer Saturday. Probably was the busiest token exchange point on BR!

JF

[Tim H]

The viaduct on the closed section of the Callendar and Oban high above Glen Ogle.

 

Not sure of the line, but the viaduct across the Don valley visible from the ex-GC Sheffield-Doncaster line.

 

The surviving bits of embankment around Swansea Victoria, just tantalising remains that give little clue as to where the railway went.

 

The bridge the now carries the A4 in Reading over the A33, built on the trackbed of the old Reading South freight branch.

 

The Leek and Manifold railway, especially the bit now used as minor road including a tunnel.

[Captain Kernow]

I scaled the hills and visited the old signal box there, back in the mid 1980s. The view from the edge of the viaduct was incredible.

Yes, Simon Castens and I went there in the early 1990s, so windswept and beautiful, utterly evocative. What a fantastic line that must have been... 'the railway is run on tea and bad language'....

 

Never new it when it was open but the remains at Dunford Bridge on the Woodhead line when I went around there in the mid eighties

Yes, we did that too, albeit a few years earlier in the late 1980s, rather eerie, dwarfed by the high fells at that location, saw it on a clear but bitterly cold winters day, as I recall...

 

 

 

 

Just thought of another one, which for me virtually trumps all my other ones - the hugely overgrown track of the Tintern branch, last used in 1981 but the track still in situ, mature saplings growing through the sleepers, then all growth suddenly disappearing as the track plunges into the gloom of Tidenham Tunnel... the atmosphere will have been slightly changed now, since the entrance to the tunnel has apparently been fenced off, to protect bats...

[figworthy]

Not sure of the line, but the viaduct across the Don valley visible from the ex-GC Sheffield-Doncaster line.

 

 

The Dearne Valley line I think.

[figworthy]

The ex-GWR Bala - Festiniog route between Transfyrwyd and the point at which it starts the drop down to Bala.  The engineering as it clings to the hill side always amazes me when I go past.  Sadly it closed far to early for me to have had the opportunity to travel along it.

 

 

Adrian