Since the 24th October through till the 1st November the railway through the Calder valley has been severed in both directions to allow for some very important work to take place at Todmorden. A £3.7m Great North Rail Project investment is seeing the 1840-built Grade II listed structure grit blasted to its bare metal to allow structural repairs to take place.
180-year-old bridge designed by railway pioneer George Stephenson is a skew bridge over the Rochdale canal. The single 31 m (102 ft) cast iron span, consists of a pair of bowed ribs with vertical hangars projected above the ribs in an ornamental Gothic arcade. The abutments are semi-octagonal castellated turrets. The whole structure looks very grand and must have been incredibly impressive in its day, projecting the power of the new railways.
Meanwhile, Taylors bridge, which carries the railway over Rose Bank Road just to the West of Todmorden station has been completely reconstructed with two disused sections permanently removed as part of the same investment.
Sadly, due to other commitments and the lousy weather we’ve been having, I didn’t have chance to visit and record the work until Friday 3oth, by which time Taylors bridge had been replaced, with all the old spans removed and the new ones dropped into place by a huge crane (which had already left the site. Network Rail and its contractors were busy replacing the track, ready for services to restart. Here’s a selection of images from my visit.







Despite the awful weather we’ve been having whilst the work’s been going on (including this weekend, there high winds and heavy rain as I’m writing this on Sunday evening!) it’s expected that the railway will be open to traffic on Monday morning.
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Thank you!
Hi Paul, great to see your excellent pictures of the Calder Valley line. I am a colleague of your wife, Dawn on Women in Community Rail’s Steering Group. I am also Chair of Friends of Littleborough Stations and co-organiser of the Electric Railway Charter (ERC) campaign to electrify the Calder Valley line. The other co-organiser is Stephen Waring , long time chair of HADRAG. We have tried to get a couple of your colleagues at RAIL to do an article about the ERC in the past- including Philip Haigh and,, not so recently, Steve Broadbent. I am enjoying your biennial rail rover article(s) for RAIL. It reminds me of the pleasures of rail travel -something that I have not experienced in a while.
Kind regards,
Richard Lysons