View allAll Photos Tagged Mytholmroyd
31553 heads down the Calder Valley at Brearley, just east of Mytholmroyd with 6E02 11:02 Castleton to Healey Mills "Departmental". 5/2/93. This train was booked to run Mondays to Fridays at this time and the consist was normally something like this, with rail carriers prominent, carrying the output of the then still-extant CWR plant at Castleton, which closed in 2010.
60047 "Robert Owen" passes Mytholmroyd with 7M57 Milford West Sidings to Fiddlers Ferry MGR. 18/5/93. Michael didn't get many shots of "Tugs" on MGRs, and no others that I remember at this spot. It was going to disappear behind vegetation shortly afterwards by the look of things!
A vast new 200 space car park has been built to serve the small station at Mytholmroyd and we are all wondering where the cars will come from to fill it. It opens up a new view of the village looking up to Midgley Moor.
150237 approaches Mytholmroyd with 2M30 16:35 York to Manchester Victoria. 20/5/87. This was soon after the Class 150/2 "Sprinters" had been introduced and it was taken in the short time that they had white nose-ends. Full yellow ends were soon added.
51829 leads a "Metro Train" branded 3-car Class 110 set on a Calder Valley Manchester to York service approaching Mytholmroyd.
30 August 1986
47443 "North Eastern" was a regular on the Trans-Pennine services towards the end of their being loco-hauled and here it's seen at Mytholmroyd with the diverted 1E15 12:46 Liverpool Lime Street to Newcastle. 8th July 1990.
A two-car Class 110, formed of cars E51833 & E51826, approaches Mytholmroyd station with 2M22 14:35 York to Manchester Victoria. 20/6/87.
The Rochdale Canal in Mytholmroyd, Calderdale, West Yorkshire.
The Rochdale is a broad canal because its locks are wide enough to allow vessels of 14 feet width. The canal runs for 32 miles (51 km) across the Pennines from the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield Basin in Manchester to join the Calder and Hebble Navigation at Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire. As built, the canal had 92 locks. Whilst the traditional lock numbering has been retained on all restored locks, and on the relocated locks, the canal now has 91. Locks 3 and 4 have been replaced with a single deep lock, Tuel Lane Lock, which is numbered 3/4.
The Rochdale Canal was conceived in 1776, when a group of 48 men from Rochdale raised £237 and commissioned James Brindley to conduct a survey of possible routes between Sowerby Bridge and Manchester. Brindley proposed a route similar to the one built, and another more expensive route via Bury. Further progress was not made until 1791, when John Rennie was asked to make a new survey in June, and two months later to make surveys for branches to Rochdale, Oldham and to a limeworks near Todmorden. Rennie at the time had no experience of building canals.
The promoters, unsure as to whether to build a wide or a narrow canal, postponed the decision until an Act of Parliament had been obtained. The first attempt to obtain an act was made in 1792, but was opposed by mill owners, concerned about water supply. Rennie proposed using steam pumping engines, three in Yorkshire, eight in Lancashire, and one on the Burnley Branch, but the mill owners argued that 59 mills would be affected by the scheme, resulting in unemployment, and the bill was defeated. In September 1792, William Crosley and John Longbotham surveyed the area in an attempt to find locations for reservoirs which would not affect water supplies to the mills. A second bill was presented to Parliament, for a canal which would have a 3,000-yard (2,700 m) tunnel and 11 reservoirs. Again the bill was defeated, this time by one vote. The promoters, in an attempt to understand the mill owners' position, asked William Jessop to survey the parts of the proposed canal that were causing most concern. Jessop gave evidence to the Parliamentary committee, and on 4 April 1794 an act was obtained which created the Rochdale Canal Company and authorised construction.
Rennie's estimated cost in the second bill was £291,000, and the company was empowered to raise the money by issuing shares, with powers to raise a further £100,000 if required. The estimate was for a narrow canal, whereas the act authorised a broad canal, and so the capital was never going to be adequate. The summit tunnel was abandoned in favour of 14 additional locks saving £20,000. Jessop proposed constructing each lock with a drop of 10 feet (3.0 m), resulting in efficient use of water and the need to manufacture only one size of lock gate.
The canal opened in stages as sections were completed, with the Rochdale Branch the first in 1798 and further sections in 1799. The bottom nine locks opened in 1800 and boats using the Ashton Canal could reach Manchester. Officially, the canal opened in 1804, but construction work continued for more three years. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km) branch from Heywood to Castleton opened in 1834.
Apart from a short profitable section in Manchester linking the Bridgewater and Ashton Canals, most of the length was closed in 1952 when an act of parliament was obtained to ban public navigation. The last complete journey had taken place in 1937, and by the mid 1960s the remainder was almost unusable. Construction of the M62 motorway in the late 1960s took no account of the canal, cutting it in two.
When an Act of Parliament was sought in 1965, to authorise the abandonment of the canal, the Inland Waterways Association petitioned against it, and when it was finally passed, it contained a clause that ensured the owners would maintain it until the adjacent Ashton Canal was abandoned. Discussion of the relative merits of restoring the canal or the Huddersfield Narrow Canal in 1973 led the formation of societies to promote both schemes in 1974. The Rochdale Canal Society wanted to see the canal fully re-opened, as part of a proposed Pennine Park
The Rochdale Canal Society worked hard both to protect the line of the canal and to begin the process of refurbishing it. A new organisational structure was created in 1984, with the formation of the Rochdale Canal Trust Ltd, who leased the canal from the owning company. The MSC-funded restoration was approaching Sowerby Bridge, where planners were proposing a tunnel and deep lock to negotiate a difficult road junction at Tuel Lane, so that a connection could be made with the Calder and Hebble Navigation. The entire eastern section from Sowerby Bridge to the summit at Longlees was open by 1990, although it remained isolated from the canal network.
In 1997, the Rochdale Canal Trust was restructured, in response to announcements that there might be large grants available as part of the millennium celebrations. The canal was still at this point owned by a private company, and the Millennium Commission would not make grants to a scheme which was for private profit, rather than public benefit. The restructuring would allow the Trust to take over responsibility for the canal from the Rochdale Canal Company. However, the plan was rejected by the Commission, and in order to access the grant of £11.3 million, the Waterways Trust took over ownership of the canal. As restoration proceeded, boats could travel further and further west, and the restoration of the sections through Failsworth and Ancoats were a significant part of the re-development of the north Manchester districts. The restored sections joined up with the section in Manchester below the Ashton Canal junction, which had never been closed, and on 1 July 2002 the canal was open for navigation along its entire length.
By the time the train passed Mytholmroyd on the Calder Valley line at 8.20 p.m., the hardy souls aboard had been on the move for 11 hours, They had another two hours to go before it reached its destination at Stafford, having started at Fort William. Running in almost darkness, the train was ten minutes late but catching up. In the gloomy conditions, this was about the best I could do.
In the cemetery in Back Lane Heptonstall is the grave of American poet Sylvia Plath, first wife of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes who spent his early years in nearby Mytholmroyd.
The stones are presumably laid by pilgrims who visit the grave.
Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.
Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in New York City where she had been a student ``guest editor'' at Mademoiselle Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.
In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes , and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book---formally precise, well wrought---show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled for a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.
The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small London flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.
At 11.12am Northern Class 142 Pacer DMU's 142095 and 142089 depart from Mytholmroyd with a Southport bound service.
142012 heads west at Mytholmroyd while working 1M37 11:52 Leeds to Blackpool North. 29/5/87. The train is about 200 yards from Mytholmroyd "old" station and would pass through without stopping.
Straight out of a horror movie scene, perhaps the most eye catching tree around the Calder Valley?
Mamiya 645
Kodak Tri-X
A Class 101 passes the disused Mytholmroyd signal box with a Manchester to York service on Saturday, 14th September 1985. I'd only just started to take railway photos in Mytholmroyd and hadn't discovered the fact that there were far better shots to be obtained at the other side of the line during daytime hours. Later my colleague Michael McNicholas, cleared out the vegetation and it became one of our favoured locations and many of the results can be seen on here. At least this angle gives a good view of the signal box, which was demolished a couple of years later.
Entering Mytholmroyd station in a blizzard today is Class 158 No 158755 heading for Manchester Victoria.
Arriving at Mytholmroyd from Manchester is Pacer No. 142017 piloting a Sprinter set. This photo shows the old platforms extending over the narrow road bridge which have been closed for many years. Now that longer platforms are needed, new extensions are being built at the other end of the station.
Class 110 DMUs were the mainstay of passenger services on the Calder Valley line from the 1960s. By the time I took this shot, other types of units were also in use on Calder Valley services and the Class 110s had been reduced from three cars to two. Mytholmroyd 'box was still in existence, but out of use, as a Class 110 passed with a Manchester to York train on the 8th May 1987.
31243 has just passed Mytholmroyd station with 7E34 14.05 Ashton to Lindsey at 8pm on the 18th May 1987.
37891 passes Mytholmroyd "New" station in the late evening of 18th May 1992 with 6E05 Stanlow to Humber Polypropylene tanks.
St John's church is in an enviable setting in the beautiful hamlet of Cragg Vale near Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire.
47488 "Railriders" charges through Mytholmroyd with the diverted 1E57 1352 Liverpool to Newcastle. 22/7/90.