Guess where and what!

[jim]

Sorry Phill, my words were meant to imply damage in WW2, not destruction. They had gone when I first went to the yard in 1958. Bomb damaged railway buildings remained out of use for a surprisingly long time after the war on railway premises. The buildings in the yard east of Wellington Bridge, between the river and the canal lasted out of use into the 1960s. They appeared intact from the outside, but were just wrecked shells inside. As to the runaway train, I don't think it attained any high speed, but just rolled along until the fall into Marsh Lane. A hundred tons plus of railway engine would have gone through the buffer stops and wall at practically anything over ten mph.

[mhoulden]

Attached is a 1:2500 map from 1964 which shows the track layout. The top edge of the old warehouse is still visible on Google Earth just outside the car park fence, so the train would have been diverted to one of the tracks that run past it. As jim says, it takes a lot to get a heavy train moving, and a lot to stop it. The train in the Cannon St crash in 1991 was travelling at 10 mph when it hit the buffers, with 2 killed and hundreds injured.I still think the Marsh Lane site has a lot of unused potential instead of a nonsense like the trolleybus. It could be a bus, tram and train interchange, with a couple of extra lines and platforms for stopping rail services (separate from the main line to let express trains go through) and the terminus of a tram line that runs along (New) York St, Boar Lane, Wellington St and Kirkstall Road, joining the Ilkley line at Kirkstall Forge.

[jim]

The goods yard siding that the engine finished upon would be one of the pair alongside the largest warehouse. I am not entirely certain, but I think the situation happened at least twice in the 1950s. I recall hearing of an A3 doing the same thing as the WD locomotive shown. I don't think this one landed in the road, just a fair amount of the tender poked through the wall, I believe I learned of this at the time, and in 1951 would not have been able to differentiate one loco type from another. Then again, my memory might be playing tricks on me - but at least it would go some way to account for the conflicting dates reported. A similar but more destructive event took place in Bradford in the 1960s. An ex-LMS 4MT 2-6-0 ran away down the bank from Laisterdyke with a short train of wagons and was diverted into Adolphus Street yard. When this lot went through the end wall of the yard there was a c30ft drop into Essex Street (I think), and the whole lot ended up being cut up for scrap where it fell.