York and the Railways
a virtual tour of the City of York and its railway past

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

This lecture was originally given at the King’s Manor, University of York. as part of York Learning Festival 2002.

TO BEGIN with the obvious: York is a very old city, and the railways are just a part – and a relatively recent part – of its long and varied story. When we look at York today we see a city which the railways have helped to shape in many important ways, but they did not come out of nowhere and they never exercised that great influence without being influenced themselves by what had gone before, and by the city in which they found themselves. The railways are often thought of as agents of radical transformation, and so they were, but their history also represents continuity; they were embedded in what already existed, socially, culturally, geographically, economically, technologically.

This lecture takes the form of an imaginary tour of York, a tour which will take place in your minds; and I wanted to emphasize this point about continuity from the outset because our tour begins in a historic York building not normally associated with the railway: this one. The King’s Manor, a largely seventeenth-century building, now part of the University of York, situated in the heart of the old city centre, a stone’s throw from the Minster. I am going to ask you to imagine that you are standing where you just came in, at the gates of this building. To your right is St Leonard’s Place; to your left, the City Art Gallery; ahead of you is the important street called Bootham, and the entrance to Gillygate; and to its right is one of the finest of York’s ancient gates, Bootham Bar. In a minute I am going to lead you, in imagination, on a short walking tour of central York, but first let us stop here for a moment and consider where we are, and why this might be an appropriate place to begin this tour. We are truly in the heart of historic York. The Minster, the Abbey ruins, the ancient churches and the Georgian houses are all a stone’s throw from where we stand. Here at the King’s Manor we are just south of the line of the Roman Via Principalis which ran from the north-west to the south-east and formed the main road of Roman York, the city of Eboracum. We are less than 250 metres from the place now known as Minster Gates, the point in front of the gates of the Principia, the headquarters building for the legionary fortress, where the Via Principalis met the Via Praetoria which came across the Ouse and into York from the south-west. From the age of the Romans onwards the lifeblood of York has flowed along its roads and its waterways. In the eighteenth century you could have made your way to any one of a number of coaching inns within a mile of King’s Manor and bought a journey to almost anywhere in Great Britain: the coming of turnpikes eased the journey by road to London, Edinburgh, and destinations far and near. Although York was largely isolated from the canal revolution there was always passenger and goods traffic along its rivers. The history of York as a transport hub is as old as York itself. The railways are relative latecomers in that history. The city was established in 71AD, so in 2002AD it is 1,931 years old. The history of York as a railway centre is less than 10% of that stretch of time; the railways arrived in 1839, making the railway age in York some 161 years old. But there is no doubting the transformation the railways have wrought in York, as I hope we will discover in the course of our imaginary walk.

Let us turn to our right, then, and walk into the wide, curving street called St Leonard’s Place. Ahead of us are two institutions of some importance in contemporary York: a Tourist Information Office and the York Theatre Royal. Tourism was an invention of the railways; it can be said to date from the 1840s, and indeed the first organised railway excursion to York took place in 1840. By 1844 large numbers of organised railway tours were arriving in the city, from Leicester, Manchester, Nottingham and other places. Some of these trains were of immense size: the Leicester Chronicle reported in October 1844 that a recent excursion from Leicester to York had been a farce because the locomotives used were insufficiently powerful to haul the train, which consisted of over sixty carriages, with the result that the train took nine hours to cover the 145 kilometre or 90 mile journey. At various points passengers were able to get out and walk faster than the train was moving, and on its arrival at York the train was so late that it had to leave again almost immediately. Such mishaps notwithstanding, York’s modern importance as a tourist centre can be said to date from the coming of the railways, and ever since the 1840s the railways have sold York as a tourist destination. The city authorities themselves took an interest in encouraging the railways to bring such lucrative traffic to York, and the origins of the modern tourist office can be found in the City Council’s efforts during this century to co-operate with the railway companies and local businesses to encourage and foster tourism.

The same can be said of the leisure and entertainment industries of York. There has been a theatre on the site of the Theatre Royal since 1744, but it is often forgotten how vital the railways were in bringing about the revival of provincial theatre in the nineteenth century. The train allowed many more touring theatrical companies to make more, and more varied and intensive, tours of provincial centres such as York. Theatrical managers were able, from the 1840s onwards, to offer their audiences a greater variety of entertainment and performers than ever before, and for York – long a centre of fashionable entertainment – the result was a theatrical and operatic life to rival that of much larger cities. And, of course, the trains brought the audiences in, from the East and North Ridings, from the industrial towns, from the small towns and villages; while the increasing population of the nineteenth-century city, for which the railways were significantly responsible, meant that a greater home audience existed. During the eighteenth century theatres had to be rebuilt constantly because of their tendency to burn down; during the nineteenth century it was the increasing audiences of the railway age which led to the Theatre Royal in York being rebuilt no fewer than three times.

To continue our imaginary walk; let us proceed down St Leonard’s Place to the crossroads. The Minster, as ever, draws the eye, but stop for a moment here to consider its setting, and in particular the nineteenth-century street improvement, Duncombe Place, that leads towards it. Formerly known as Lop Lane, this was until 1785 a narrow and twisted thoroughfare which ran almost to the west front of the Minster. In that year it was widened and straightened, although without extensive demolitions or rebuilding; it remained a relatively narrow street, and the area in front of the Minster retained its congested character. The street as we see it today was a creation of the period from 1859, when work started to widen the street, to 1903, when it was connected to Deangate, making a clear route right through the city centre. During this period the street was further widened and straightened, the south side was opened up and laid out as gardens, and new buildings were constructed: most notably the Dispensary, the Dean Court Hotel and St Wilfrid’s Catholic Church. This was a far more extensive transformation than that of 1785, involving much demolition and rebuilding and the bringing of many new materials; furthermore, it was largely both made necessary and made possible by the railway. The new road, via Museum Street and Lendal Bridge, gave a much-needed direct route from the heart of the historic city to the railway station. And many of the materials which were required were brought by train: the slates and tiles of the Dean Court Hotel, the remarkable ‘imperishable’ moulded bricks of the Dispensary, the rubble underlying the new road, the iron for railings and gates and the stone of the South African War Memorial were all brought to York by train. The river still played an important part in the carriage of bulky goods such as building materials, but by the latter half of the nineteenth century it was secondary to the railway – even goods which came into York by water had commonly been taken for at least part of their journey by rail. What you see as you look along Duncombe Place from the crossroads is a roadscape, but it is one made possible only by the railway. This story is repeated throughout York; the new buildings of the Victorian era, the streets that surround them and the business and other activities that gave them a purpose, are very often associated with the railway.

We will now follow that route down to the station. On the way, if we look to our left along Lendal, we can see in the distance the York General Post Office. The Post Office had been quick to take advantage of rail transport, and by the mid-1860s an integrated system of postal conveyance which covered the whole kingdom had been established by the Post Office and the railway companies. By the time the York Post Office was opened, in 1884, the completion of the railway systems of north and west Scotland, central Wales and the remoter parts of rural England – including north Yorkshire – meant that Britain had an integrated national postal system second to none. Every part of York had at least two deliveries a day, and a letter posted in York before noon would almost always be delivered to its recipient in London on the evening of the same day. When the railways connected York to the rest of the world, it was not only through their own rails and trains that they did so, but through the vastly improved postal system they facilitated as well.

Continuing along Museum Street we pass the Yorkshire Club, opened in 1868 and advertised as ‘convenient for the station and City’, to reach Lendal Bridge. This stands on the site of an ancient ferry crossing – the remains of the landing stage are still visible on the north side beneath the arch of the bridge. Once again this was the indirect creation of the railway. Following the opening of the first permanent railway station in York in 1841 a considerable local campaign developed in favour of a new crossing of the Ouse nearer to the station than Ouse Bridge and better able to bring the large amount of traffic generated by the railway into the heart of the city. Various plans were put forward during the 1840s and 50s, and work on a bridge ultimately began in 1859. That first Lendal Bridge, engineered by a gentleman by the name of Dredge, fell down shortly after its completion in 1861. The city responded with commendable speed to this disaster and the replacement, the present bridge, was built by Thomas Page and was opened in 1863, the cost of its construction being met by tolls until 1894.

Lendal Bridge forms just one part of a complex system of roads associated with York’s railway stations. As we stand at the southern end of the bridge, we can see on the left the thoroughfare called Rougier Street, which after an awkward bend becomes George Hudson Street. This short stretch of new urban roadway was constructed in 1843 to link Micklegate and Ouse Bridge to the new railway station at Tanner Row, and was named, of course, after the chairman of the company which had built the railway and the station – George Hudson.

Hudson was by any standards a remarkable man, and the legacy of his role in making York a railway city is all around us today. His origins were humble enough; he was a farmer’s son from the East Riding who was apprenticed to a firm of York drapers. Two things happened to him in his early manhood which proved beneficial: first, he married Elizabeth Nicolson, the daughter of one of the partners in the drapers’ firm for which he worked; and second, he inherited £30,000 from a distant relative under curious but apparently above-board circumstances. This was in 1827, and with this fortune he was able to begin a political career. He became a leading figure among the Tories of York (and early nineteenth-century York was a Whig, or Liberal, city) and by 1836 he was Lord Mayor of the City. His leading position in York, and the patronage and influence it gave him, enabled Hudson to become chairman of the first line in the city, the York & North Midland Railway. Why did Hudson become interested in railways? There are various possibilities: one is that he simply sought out the current best financial growth opportunity, and that in the 1830s railways had the same attraction for investors as, for example, the internet had in the late 1990s. Another is that he remained, at heart, a draper, and wanted York to become another Leeds, a centre of the drapery trade. To become a drapery centre York needed mills, and mills needed coal; coal would have to come by railway, hence Hudson began to be interested in railways. Whatever the reason, Hudson saw railways as the future for York – and for the country as a whole, for he did possess a vision that was ahead of its time.

George Hudson Street was not named after him for long; he fell from grace in 1849, and from then until 1971 the street was called, neutrally, Railway Street. It had long been suspected that some of Hudson’s business practices depended upon a somewhat creative approach to accountancy, and in 1849 his misdeeds finally caught up with him when he was found to have paid the dividends of the Eastern Counties Railway, with which he had become involved, out of capital. He fled the country, bankrupt and in disgrace, and died in poverty in Calais in 1871. But in the ten years since he had presided over the opening of the York & North Midland Railway Hudson had built up a network of lines which traversed the entire country. He was the driving force behind the creation of the first of the great Victorian amalgamated railway companies, the Midland Railway, in 1844. Unlike his contemporaries he did not see railways as essentially local concerns, linking town to town, industry to coalfield, coalfield to canal. He saw them as national, as integrated networks governed by the natural momentum of monopoly rather than the fragmentation of competition favoured by contemporary ideology. The railways did not have to come to York; but Hudson made them come, by creating in the York & North Midland Railway a vehicle through which he could expand his influence across the region and create in York a focus of the regional, and ultimately national, network which could not be ignored.

The first lines to open in York, then, were all connected in some way with Hudson. The York & North Midland Railway opened on 29 May 1839 and ran from a temporary station outside the city walls to join with the Leeds and Selby railway some distance south and west of the city. In June 1840 the line was opened through to connect with the North Midland Railway at Altofts Junction. This meant that for the first time York was connected to London by railway; indeed, the first through train between the two cities ran in May 1840, before the official opening via Altofts Junction. It took thirteen hours to get from York to London – but the fastest stagecoach took two to three days, and sometimes as much as five or six days. The second line to open to York was the grandly-named Great North of England Railway. This line had originally been intended to link the Tyne with the industrial heartland of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and had been planned to run from Gateshead to Tadcaster, and there swing towards Leeds, missing out York altogether. Hudson was not having that, and after much persuasion from the directors of the York & North Midland Railway the Great North of England agreed to take their line via York. A joint station was agreed, and it is this station which we reach next on our imaginary walk. It is an unassuming building, in an elegant classical style, facing Tanner Row, and contained administrative offices and a very successful hotel as well as the booking office, waiting rooms and all the other facilities of a significant city terminal. The hotel, incidentally, was the subject of a protest by the York licensed victuallers, who complained to the directors of the York & North Midland Railway that a railway company had no business running hotels and that their hotel would be damaging to the city’s established hotels, inns and public houses. The hotel, of course, was constructed anyway, and given the amount of new traffic which the railways brought to York it may be doubted whether any harm to the city’s hostelries resulted.

The station opened on 4 January 1841. It was a terminus, and all through services, such as the London (Euston) to Darlington services, had to reverse at York before continuing their journey. Standing just beyond the later North Eastern Railway (NER) headquarters building and looking towards the location of the present station, we see a substantial width of road, the low buildings of the old station tucked away on the left, the vast bulk of the NER war memorial (of which more later) ahead of us, and the city wall, pierced by two arches, on our right. Had we stood here in the mid-nineteenth century, we would have seen this whole area filled with railway tracks and the coming and going of trains. Not only was the station itself a hive of activity, there were sidings between the station and the city wall, and beyond platforms, trains and clouds of steam and smoke we would have glimpsed what remains one of the most dramatic mementoes of the importance of the railways in nineteenth-century York: the arch knocked through the city wall to allow the tracks access to the old station. To see this arch now you have to make your way along the city wall itself, peer over the parapet of the Queen Street bridge, or slip into railway property (not recommended) to see it from within. It now sees only the coming and going of road vehicles to and from the former BR buildings that occupy the old station site, but for more than three decades it (and the second arch which was constructed alongside it to serve increasing traffic) was a gateway which rivalled Micklegate, Walmgate or Bootham Bars as a great entrance to this city. Imagine trying to get permission to knock a hole in the city walls today; yet the City of York in the late 1830s was willing to accommodate whatever requests the railway interest – headed, of course, by their own George Hudson – was prepared to make in order to keep York at the forefront of railway development. And, looking at all that the railways have brought to York and all that they have contributed to the city’s prosperity and development since, who is to say that they were wrong? In any case, it has to be said that York has been fortunate in the care taken by its railways to damage its archaeology and history as little as possible. The two arches through the wall were carefully designed – by the architect of the station and hotel, G. T. Andrews – and cannot be said to harm the character of the wall; Andrews’s design was approved by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society before construction was permitted to commence. Even during the immense works associated with the construction of the new station outside the walls in the 1870s the railway company concerned – by that time the North Eastern – was careful to provide for an archaeological investigation of the Roman cemetery upon which the station stands. This brings to mind the long-standing legend that Boadicea is buried beneath the platforms of King’s Cross Station in London; if that story is true, then it is an interesting and somewhat poetic point that the traveller from London to York by rail will tread upon the grave of that great British queen at departure, and upon the graves of her enemies at his destination.

In many ways the railways were victims of their own success in York. The relatively humble station buildings of the 1840s, although rebuilt and extended, rapidly proved inadequate to the traffic; above all the site itself was cramped and restrictive. In 1862 the novelist Wilkie Collins published his novel No Name, set in the mid-1840s, which included a sketch of the York station of that time:

That entire incapability of devising administrative measures for the management of large crowds, which is one of the characteristics of Englishmen in authority, is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than at York. Three different lines of railway assemble three passenger mobs, from morning to night, under one roof; and leave them to raise a traveller’s riot, with all the assistance which the bewildered servants of the company can render to increase the confusion. The customary disturbance was rising to its climax as Captain Wragge approached the platform. Dozens of different people were trying to attain dozens of different objects, in dozens of different directions, all starting from the same common point and all equally deprived of the means of information.

York station became a by-word for chaos: The Times of 17 September 1847 called it ‘ill-planned, worse managed, and far too small for the traffic’. The construction of Lendal Bridge and other improvements around the station in the 1850s and 60s went some way towards remedying the situation, but the only final solution was the construction of an entirely new station. This occurred in the 1870s, as we shall see.

First, though, let us turn from the middle of the century to its end by turning away from the old station and looking at the substantial building which faces it and looks across towards and over the city walls. This building, constructed between 1900 and 1906 in the then fashionable and elegant Queen Anne revival style, was the headquarters of the company which, in the years after Hudson’s fall, grew to become the greatest railway power in the region: the North Eastern Railway Company. This company, like the Midland, was the product of amalgamation, and – as with the Midland – its creation was controversial and long-delayed. The Victorian state was wedded to the ideology of competition and laissez-faire; amalgamation, whatever the commercial, geographical and administrative logic behind it, was seen as offending against the guiding principle of competition and tended to be resisted. However, the formation of the Midland Railway in 1844 marked something of a change in attitudes, and the authorization of the NER in 1854 showed the change more clearly. The new company consisted of three large systems – the York & North Midland, the York, Newcastle & Berwick and the Leeds Northern – with a number of smaller railways; and it followed the York & North Midland in being headquartered in York.

The North Eastern, like the city it called home, was an independent-minded and self-confident concern which saw itself as a natural monopoly in its region and indulged in fierce rivalry with any concerns – notably the Hull & Barnsley, which expressed the equally independent spirit of that other great Yorkshire city, Hull – which threatened its dominance. Its relationship with its home city was close and amicable, which was as well for York because it was almost entirely dependent on the NER for its rail services. The services of seven other companies reached the city, but they all did so over NER metals. The importance of the North Eastern in late nineteenth-century York can be judged from this headquarters building; with its black ironwork and moulded stone dressings, and the armorial device of the NER prominent on its façade, it stands as a monument both to the self-confidence and influence of the Victorian railway companies and the importance of York as a railway city. As with Hudson’s station, it remains in railway usage today. Another symbol of the close relationship between York and the North Eastern is just outside the city walls: the statue of George Leeman, which stands alongside the road which bears his name. Leeman was, like Hudson, three times Lord Mayor of York, although unlike Hudson he was a Liberal; he was also York’s Member of Parliament. He combined a leading part in the political life of York with a prominent career in the North Eastern Railway, serving as a director from its formation in 1854 and becoming Chairman of the Company from 1874 to 1880.

Across the end of the street, facing the roadway down to Lendal Bridge and into the city, stands another monument to the power and influence of the North Eastern Railway: the company’s war memorial. This vast edifice is often mistaken by visitors to the city, and perhaps even by some less knowledgeable residents, for the city’s own war memorial. It is no such thing; it is the memorial of a private company. What its scale says about that company is even more remarkable when it is considered that this is the second, reduced design for the memorial, the first having been rejected by the city authorities as too large and overbearing for the site. By the time the memorial, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was unveiled in 1924, the North Eastern Railway itself had ceased to exist, having been absorbed into the London & North Eastern Railway in the 1923 grouping of the railways into four large companies. But as well as commemorating the sacrifice of the men of the railway who gave their lives in the First World War, this monument symbolizes the NER’s legacy to the city it served and in some ways dominated for the best part of seventy years.

To continue our walk, we pass through the southernmost of the two arches with which the city walls were pierced in the 1860s as part of a new road scheme. This scheme, again, was entirely due to the railways and their effect on York, for it was designed to serve the new station finally being built outside the city walls. The station followed the curve of the main line as it swept around the bend in the river and swung out to the west; the result was a vast curved edifice which has been described by the architectural writer Patrick Nuttgens as ‘possibly the major architectural monument of post-reformation York’. Preparation of the new station site was begun in 1866 and construction started in 1874, being completed in 1877; the architect was Thomas Prosser and the building was completed by Benjamin Burleigh and William Peachey. The deal which the NER reached with the city involved permission being granted for new access roads to be built through the city walls – hence the two large arches through which Station Road weaves its way. If we make our way through the arch adjacent to the war memorial and follow the road around, a panorama of the 1877 station opens out before us. Its curved glazed roof, supported on iron columns with the arms of the NER cast into the spandrels, is 800 feet long and over 230 feet wide; the main span over the tracks is 81 feet wide and 43 feet high, with subsidiary spans of 55 feet wide and 40 feet high on either side. It was rivalled only by the Minster itself in scale and ambition, and in an age in which the influential journal The Building News was proclaiming that railway stations were ‘to the nineteenth what monasteries and cathedrals were to the thirteenth century’ it is not surprising that comments were soon being made about ‘a cathedral of iron and glass’ and a new ‘cathedral of steam’ to rival York’s mighty ‘cathedral of stone’.

If we go through the main entrance and stand on platform 3, we gain some idea of the two-sided nature of any large railway station, something particularly apparent at York. A railway station is both a working installation and a ceremonial, celebratory gateway between city and railway. The station is filled with the apparatus of the working railway – signals (and formerly signal boxes), the overhead power lines, the mail depot – and with the accoutrements necessary for the comfort of the passenger and the celebration of speedy, comfortable travel – waiting rooms, refreshment rooms, bookstalls – and all is enclosed in an architectural framework of surpassing magnificence. York has a station worthy of its greatness as a city, and arriving there is always something of an event, even late at night when your first concern is sprinting for taxi. While we are here on the station platform, this might be an appropriate point at which to consider the kind of passenger traffic which York has seen over the years. The premier services here, of course, have always been on the main line between London, the north and Scotland. At first the York & North Midland ran trains to London (Euston Square) via Derby and Normanton; the arrival of the Great Northern Railway in 1852 changed that and a much faster through service to King’s Cross was instituted. Hudson had fought long and hard against the Great Northern, which had first been proposed in practical form in 1844; he saw it, rightly, as threatening his dominance of the railways which formed the backbone of the national network in the midlands and north; but almost his last act before his fall in 1849 was to come to an agreement with the Great Northern whereby they would obtain running powers via York. By the time the more direct route to London via Selby and Doncaster was opened in 1871 trains to London were timetabled to take 4 hours and 40 minutes – a time which seems slow to us today, but was a remarkable feat for the time.

Direct through traffic between London and Scotland via York became a reality in 1855 with an agreement between the three companies between which the east coast route was divided – the Great Northern, the North Eastern and the North British – to work together to their mutual benefit. The result was the famous ‘East Coast Joint Stock’ which was a familiar sight at York until the establishment of the LNER in 1923. York undoubtedly benefited greatly from its position on the east coast main line, providing a convenient stopping point for traffic between the south and Scotland to the benefit of its hotels, restaurants and shops. When ‘society’ went to Scotland for the shooting season, most went from King’s Cross to the Highlands. Their trains passed through York, and many of them stayed in the city, if only overnight, bringing social cachet and valuable business. The city also generated traffic of its own, notably for York races, which were rising in status during the mid-nineteenth century; in the NRM collection is a painting which shows Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arriving at King’s Cross to catch a train to York for the races in 1850. Then there were the important regional traffics which had their focus at York: services to Leeds, Harrogate, Hull, Scarborough, Whitby, and the smaller local branches. This intersection of the local and the national, the high society and the workaday, made York a particularly varied and busy station, and the benefits of that constant traffic extended beyond the station to influence the city as a whole.

The station is only one part of what remains a large and complex railway landscape to the west and north of the city centre, but which is a shadow of the vast railway presence that dominated this area from the late nineteenth century to as recently as the 1980s. From the Ouse at Scarborough Bridge to Holgate and as far out as Water End Road stretched a great expanse of tracks and railway installations. North of the station was the Clifton or York North Motive Power Depot, built in the 1870s, which was home to many NER, LNER and BR locomotive types – including most of the famous Deltic diesels – before it finally closed in 1982. Steam was transferred away in 1967, resulting in a considerable reduction in the facilities. But of course the site found a new lease of life in the mid-1970s with the establishment of the National Railway Museum, and today the site of the former York North Motive Power Depot on Leeman Road is perhaps more at the centre of the railway world than it ever was as a working railway site. There were other locomotive facilities at York; the York & North Midland Railway had established their locomotive sheds adjacent to their station at Tanner Row – and, in an interesting prefiguring of the eventual fate of York North, one of the York & North Midland sheds was used in the 1920s to house York’s first railway museum. There was also an early shed outside the city walls, on the site which became the 1877 station; and further sheds and facilities were constructed during the 1850s inside the triangle formed between Holgate and North junctions. At Queen Street the York & North Midland established extensive locomotive workshops, which while they never became a centre for locomotive construction did become a major centre for maintenance and rebuilding until their closure in 1905. What York was known for was carriage and wagon construction, and the carriage and wagon works – the former established in the 1880s, the latter in the 1860s – occupied a vast area in this railway realm. By the time of its greatest expansion in the 1930s, the wagon works occupied 17 acres, while the carriage works at the same time had spread itself over more than 40 acres of land. It is a strange experience now to visit the areas formerly occupied by these vast hives of industry and find the railway presence reduced to a few vestiges and the rest of the site divided between large industrial sheds, housing developments, and weed-grown dereliction. It is hard to believe that literally thousands of railway vehicles were built and sent out across the network from this place between the 1860s and the 1990s, and that thousands of York people spent their working lives in what was almost a railway city within a city.

Then there were the goods facilities. If we retrace our steps across the front of the station and turn into Leeman Road, we will pass beneath the massive railway bridge ironically known as ‘Marble Arch’ and emerge facing what is now the National Railway Museum. The elegant building on our left, where the main City Entrance to the Museum is located, is the former goods station offices, with warehouse behind – now home to the NRM’s ‘Station Hall’ displays. The Leeman Road goods station was a very busy one and from its opening in the 1890s to its demise in the 1970s a vast tonnage of goods of all kinds flowed into York from the world beyond, courtesy of the railway system. Leeman Road was not the only goods terminal in York: the large depot at Foss Islands Road dealt with bulk goods and livestock, but our imaginary walk has already been tiring enough and I am not going to make your imaginations walk all the way out there this evening. Furthermore, while York was never an industrial city it did generate substantial freight traffics of its own. Rather than looking, close your eyes and smell; if the wind is in the right direction you may well pick up the scent of chocolate. The wind changes, and suddenly you can smell the sweet odour of the sugar beet works. Both Rowntree’s, which made use of the rail system from the 1860s to transport their products from their factories in Tanner’s Moat and North Street and, ultimately, Haxby, and the sugar works, which was established in 1926, had private siding facilities and fed a constant flow of goods onto the main lines of York’s railways. Other notable local concerns making use of the railways were the York Glass Company and Thomlinson Walker’s the ironfounders. The next time you visit the British Museum, pause to examine the magnificent railings and gates of that institution, black-painted and massive, and you will find them marked with the words Thomlinson Walker – ironfounders – York. Those railings came to London in 1846, by train from York.

To end our railway perambulation around York, and before bringing our look at York and its railways right up to date, let us take a last look into the past by entering the National Railway Museum. As mentioned before, the NRM occupies a number of former railway buildings including part of the site of the York North MPD and Leeman Road Goods Station. The National Railway Museum came to York in 1975. I say ‘came to York’ because it was a new institution – the first national museum to be located outside London, and the first national museum devoted to the history of Britain’s railways – but it can also be seen as a continuation of the history of York’s earlier railway museum, established by the NER in part of the Queen Street workshops site in 1922 and opened to the public by the LNER in 1928, which remained in being until 1973. The decision to amalgamate the collections of this museum with the historic relics held by the British Railways Board and the railway collections of the Museum of British Transport at Clapham was taken in 1971, in the wake of recommendations contained in the 1968 Transport Act; the latter museum also closed in 1973. The original NRM was based in nos 3 and 4 roundhouses of the former York North MPD; it is this building that is the basis of the Main Hall of the Museum as we see it today, although the deteriorating condition of the original buildings necessitated extensive reconstruction in the early 1990s and the structure as it stands today is substantially new. As we look around the Main Hall we can see various exhibits that have a direct connection with York, notably the LNER A4 pacific Mallard, resplendent in the blue livery it wore on the occasion of its 126 mph run in 1938; the Great Northern Railway Stirling ‘Single’ no. 1; the prototype Deltic; and, less glamorously perhaps, the NER 0-6-0 freight locomotive no. 1275, a workhorse of the lines in and around York from the 1870s until after the second world war. In the South Hall, the old Leeman Road goods shed, stands an exquisitely elegant teak-bodied East Coast Joint Stock Carriage of 1898, of the type often seen passing through York on the East Coast Main Line. Among the smaller exhibits is the clock made by the York clockmakers William Avison in 1840, which bears the slogan ‘railway time’, reminding us of the crucial role played by the railways in establishing a universal standard of time in Britain and abroad.

Evidence of another, dramatic, part of York’s railway history is to be found if we make our way to the south side of the Main Hall, where there is a small metal plaque commemorating the bombing of York on 29 April 1942. The plaque marks the spot where a high explosive bomb penetrated the running shed, damaging two locomotives so seriously that both had to be withdrawn from service. In the same raid, York station was badly damaged and there was much heroic effort on the part of railway staff in moving vehicles clear of danger while the raid was still going on in order to minimise destruction; lower-key heroics were performed in the aftermath of the raid to clear up the mess and get the railway working again. The main target of the raid would seem to have been the railway rather than the city – this was not a true ‘Baedeker’ raid – but the Guildhall and St Martin’s Church in the historic centre of York itself were destroyed. Not a major raid by the standards of Plymouth and Coventry, but bad enough; and the small plaque in the floor of the NRM is one of the few reminders of the destruction of that night in York.

The NRM’s most recent addition, ‘The Works’, includes a gallery giving a view across the main lines heading north out of York station, so this seems an appropriate place to conclude our walk, with an overview of York and the railways today, and a brief glimpse at what the future may hold. As we stand on the gallery overlooking the East Coast Main Line, what do we see? Well, of course, we see wires, the wires of the overhead electric power supply. Electrification of the ECML began in 1985 and was completed to Carstairs in 1989; in February 1987 the 12,000th mast was erected on platform 3 of York station, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher performing the ceremony, as recorded in a commemorative plaque which you can see attached to the mast in question. The faster travel, comfort and cleanliness of the electrified ECML amounts to a transformation from steam days and has undoubtedly contributed to the growth in passenger numbers experienced on the line since the late 1980s. And what of the trains? There is probably more colour and variety in liveries to be seen at York now than at any time since the heyday of the pre-grouping railways, when the locomotives and carriages of seven companies, not to mention the great variety of private-owner freight vehicle liveries, were to be seen passing through the station. The dark blue and red of GNER on high-speed diesel 125 and electric 225 trains tends to predominate, but there is also now the red of Virgin Trains, the claret and gold of Arriva; then there are the various liveries of the freight trains and the colour schemes applied to particular vehicles in freight and parcels service. Whatever else privatisation may have brought to the railway at York and elsewhere, it certainly presents a colourful scene. As for freight, if we wait long enough we are certain to see a coal train or two, and occasional trains of containers and cars. And turning to look at York station itself, we see a station still bursting with life and activity. The station itself is well cared for and has seen a number of sympathetic restoration and adaptation programmes over recent years. It is not frozen in time, it is not a heritage exhibit, it is a busy station on a working railway, and yet it has successfully preserved its character. In that sense, it can be said to be like the city itself, successful, busy, prosperous, and of its time, but retaining a sense of its history and individuality which informs the way it responds to the challenges of the present day.

© Ralph Harrington 2002. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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