Taking in locomotives sold off by the LMS, LNER and British Railways for a new life of extended service in industry, we start at the former Manchester Collieries network at Walkden and then head east, concluding this photographic journey in Scunthorpe where we only just catch a fading rarity before its final disposal.
In Colour
The Manchester Collieries network centred on Walkden, Lancashire grew from an 1835 horse-drawn narrow gauge line from Sandersons Pit to a wharf on the Bridgewater Canal at Worsley. Rapid expansion of main line railways saw the colliery line converted to standard gauge in 1852, and the 1860s opening of Bridgewater Colliery, north of Sandersons, was followed by a string of other pits as lines were extended to serve them via a focal point of sidings at Ashtons Field near Farnworth. Latterly Bridgewater was renamed Sandhole Colliery and it is here that former North Staffordshire Railway ‘New L’ class 0-6-2T Sir Robert (NSR No 72/LMS No 2262) is captured shunting the washery sidings on Monday, 13 June 1966. The locomotive shed is on the left in this view. The pit itself had closed in 1962 but the washery continued to receive coal from other connected pits and from Bedford Colliery at Leigh – it was moved to Sandersons sidings by BR for onward movement over the NCB lines.
Ashtons Field sidings were north-west of Sandhole and a reversal there brought you south to Walkden yard and the main workshops where another ‘New L’ class 0-6-2T, previously NSR No 69 and LMS 2257 but now named King George VI, is in the yard and attached to a colliery brake van on Sunday, 19 April 1964. Bridgewater Collieries was one of six companies in the area that agreed to a merger in March 1929 to form Manchester Collieries, a coal mining company that brought with it a collective modernisation plan and, shortly after that, in 1937, the company acquired five former NSR ‘New L’ class 0-6-2T locomotives from the LMS – Nos 2257, 2262, 2264, 2270 and 2271 – to work its main line trains around the network. These modern engines were deemed surplus to requirements by the LMS, essentially because they were non-standard, but they were to see another 30-odd years of use here.
Smoke drifts around the workshop pound at Walkden as NSR ‘New L’ class 0-6-2T Kenneth (originally NSR No 22) awaits its next turn alongside a pair of ubiquitous ‘Austerity’
