John Dedman describes a visit to the major freight hub of Mossend Yard near Motherwell in June 1989.
I started my railway photography in the mid 1970s after moving to a house which backed on to the Bournemouth main line at New Milton. This rekindled my railway interests which I lost at the end of steam in 1967 and I started getting into railway modelling and photography. During the next few years I started to travel further from home every year, mainly searching out various freight flows and locos in different parts of the country. By the late 1980s we had visited the Midlands, the Warrington area and Teesside and now Scotland was calling, so two of us planned a trip north.
On Sunday 25th June we drove north with the obligatory stop at Bescot for a walk up and down the loco sidings where locos were stabled for the weekend. We were refused admission to the depot but we did get sight of some locomotives.
On Monday morning we were in Scotland and started at Millerhill Depot at 7.00 a.m. where permission was granted for a look around the depot. We moved on to Thornton Depot and then on to Thornton Junction. We thought we would try to get some push pull Class 47/7 action so found a spot near Linlithgow.
It was now late in the day and we were running out of light so we had a quick look at the south end of Mossend Yard, where there was a lineside spot where all movements could be seen. We also found that we could drive along the east side of the yard to get to the north end. Here we found what looked like an old slag heap where we could park up and get great views of the yard; this looked like a good location to start from the following morning.
The table lists all the workings observed during the day, many of the workings are unidentified as train working information was much more difficult to obtain compared to today. Some local readers may be able to identify some of the workings.
Our morning started at 05:00 with 37092 and 37010 on the first iron ore working of the day from Hunterston to Ravenscraig steel works. This was closely followed by a northbound Freightliner passing through to Coatbridge behind an unidentified Class 87 and 86401 in Network South East livery. A few minutes later the Euston to Inverness overnight sleeper arrived behind 90029 which was quickly replaced by 47642 for its run north. From then on there were freight and light engine movements ever
