Wigan Album

What has happened to our railways..why have we let them die?

I totally agree what has been done should be classed as sabotage and those to blame should be ashamed!

Does anybody know the location of this box?

This would be at Ashton-in-Makerfield station just to the west of Lodge Lane (A49) near Haydock Park racecourse. It was on the ex-Great Central branch line from Lowton St Marys to St Helens Central, now closed - not on today's Wigan/Liverpool line passing through Bryn.

If you cut and paste this link:
http://maps.nls.uk/view/101103647
it should take you to a six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map dated 1929. When you zoom in on the map, Ashton-in-Makerfield station is shown close to the middle of the top border, and the symbol "SB" next to the railway line marks the position of the signal box. "SP" are the signal posts.

Just about where the line goes out of sight, the M6 motorway now flys over the top of the railway.

Never seen this photo before, it's not on the disused stations website. Where do people get these rare photos from?. I think it's easy to blame the likes of Beeching for the demise of our stations, but it's likely he was just a puppet and following orders.

Dr Beeching was brought in as the axeman, to sort out BR.
He was put on a salary of £24.000 a year, a huge amount for 1961.
He was later made a Baron.

The transport minister at that time was Ernest Marples, who had a vested interest in destroying the rail network.
The company he owned was all to do with road building!

Marples was also made a Baron in later life.
You couldn't make it up, could you?

Thanks EE and Winder.

ernest marples was transport minister and a senior director with ridgeway/marples who just happened to be, road builders,you just cant make it up..
today he would have been disqualified from being transport minister.
never mind beeching saving cash he caused the country plenty of misery and untold damage to its infrastructure.

I am afraid Beeching is not the villain of the piece. The combination of the Second World War, the rundown of the railways post war, the lack of planning which saw over a thousand new steam locomotives built between 1947 and 1960 and then a decision was made in 1955 to scrap steam by 1970 (in the end it was 1968). The replacement diesels were ordered off the drawing board and half didn't work properly! Beeching was brought in to tend to a dying patient and his cure was cutting thousands of miles of track. Some did need cutting but he cut too much and he did not understand that the smaller routes fed into the main lines so he closed important feeds that were the lifeblood of communities. This line lost it's passenger services in 1952, well before Beeching came along.

I'm so very lucky to have witnessed the last decade of steam. It has left me with a legacy of quiet content, knowing that there were better days. Pemberton, where I was born and raised, is basically a railway village; so many memories of the Loop Line and the long coal trains stabled in Winstanley Coll Sidings. And I will always remember the young firemen who spoke to the kids and were never nasty or aloof. Alas, a lost century now.