Penistone's Railway

Index of Topics
To sections on this page.

• The Station.
• A Plaque to the Fallen.
• Old Journeys.
  

This Picture - It shows the station buildings and car park as they are now. It is very rare to see the car park empty. The far section of the buildings is used for restoring antique furniture and the nearest section is a wine cellar. Access to Platform two is at the end by the bicycle storage lockers, near the canopy.

The Station
The picture on the right (not 'clickable') is a tiny section taken from a church tower photo. It shows the original three-storey Penistone Railway Station building used for the Woodhead line before the new station shown above was built. After a viaduct arch collapsed in February 1916, a temporary 'station' was provided at the Viewlands end of the viaduct for Huddersfield trains, accessible up some steps from Barnsley Road. It served its purpose for six months or so until the viaduct could be repaired.

In the pictures below, the top row of black and white pictures are from the 1970s (taken with a Praktica camera), with the third and fourth from around 1974. At the time, the pre-war coaches in an unused siding were being used for railway maintenance purposes, as a mobile workshop and stores.

The first on the second row from a 1977 transparency whe the line was still open to electrically-hauled freight. You can clearly see the catenary wires and supports. The Woodhead line was a leader in electrification using 1.5kV DC power and the locomotives employed regenerative braking. With advances in electronic control systems, AC power became a better choice with lower power losses over the long cables but it was deemed too expensive to convert the old DC system and locomotives over to AC, mostly because the much higher voltages would have needed greater clearances and the pick-up cable would have needed larger insulators.

A Plaque to the Fallen, 2021
Following the rebuilding of the long wall on Platform Two (line to Huddersfield), a plaque dedicated to local railway workers who lost their lives in the Great War of 1914 - 1918 has been professionally installed in the wall. It came about through the efforts of the Penistone Line Partnership (Fb).

A heartfelt dedication was held at 11am on 15th November 2021 by Fr David Hopkin of Penistone St John's church, attended by Penistone Mayor Cllr. Andrew Millner, who laid a wreath, members of Penistone Line Partnership and the Community Rail Network, Deputy Mayor Cllr Gill Millner, Penistone Royal British Legion members and local community guests.

The plaque had been made and gifted by Fred Evans of JF Evans Monumental Masons, who received thanks from the event. Also, thanks given to Network Rail for incorporating the plaque into their newly re-built wall. The ceremony was followed by refreshments at Penistone Town Hall (Paramount).

A message on Facebook from Jay McShane gives some background to one of the men who was her great-Uncle, buried in Thiepval:
'Lance Corporal Charles Edward Swift was k.i.a. on 18th September, 1916 at Flers Courcelette on the Somme. He was a bell ringer at the church of St. John the Baptist in Penistone and worked on the railway. With no known grave, he is commemorated, one of over 72,000 soldiers, on Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.'

In 1916, Thiepval was one of the fortress villages on the Somme and a large memorial monument has been set up there with a visitor centre under the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). The fields of identical memorial stones and crosses are kept in perfect condition by the CWGC.

The plaque was fitted by workmen to the Huddersfield-bound platform wall in 2021. They did an expert job of recessing the plaque into the wall. It reads:

1914 - 1918
In memory of the following railway workers from the Penistone area who gave their lives during the First World War

Jospeh Bailey - Yorks and Lancs
George Henry Beever - Loyal North Lancashire Regiment
Charles Richard Calcutt - Yorks and Lancs
Radford Hawes - Royal Engineers
George Neaverson Hoyland - Royal Horse Guards
Horace Micklethwaite - Royal Field Artillery
George Alfred Mitchell - Yorks and Lancs
Walter Dickinson Nall - Yorks and Lancs
Fred Singleton - West Yorkshire Regiment
Charles Edward Swift - Yorks and Lancs
Albert Webster - Yorks and Lancs
Harry Wood - Royal Navy

WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

Old Journeys
As a small child, I would dismay my mum by running over the iron bridge from Church View Road to the station (Barnsley platform), to deliberately be engulfed in steam and smoke from passing locomotives. I loved all that sulphuric pollution but my dear mum had always suffered from respiratory problems and she did not want me to be the same.

Near to the bridge was a water tank for the steam engines with its droopy rubber hose. There were a couple of semaphore signals nearby. Our station was always known as one of the coldest and windiest in the country. Many a through-traveller would attest to that. It also had a warm Waiting Room with a roaring fire in winter. I recall that the somewhat worn bench seats in the Waiting Room had some of their stuffing visible which looked like straw.

Until a few years before the Woodhead line closure, the main platform had good facilities: a popular cafe bar, waiting room with a roaring coal fire, ladies waiting room, Ladies & Gents toilets and the ticket office. There was also a parcel room for the postal service and I suspect that mail was sorted there. There were separate platforms for Barnsley, Manchester, Sheffield and Huddersfield but those last two are all that remain. The ticket office was in an entrance hall which had subway stairs to below the tracks, to emerge on the Manchester platform. Many's the time I had to run under there to catch the Manchester train from the middle platform.

The carriages were usually compartments with a corridor from one end of the carriage to the other. Each compartment had bench seats, with two lamps, two pictures and a mirror on each side. There was always a musty smell. There was a heater under the seats blowing warm air. The seats usually had pull-down arm rests. There would usually be a blind on the window to pull down or to partially pull down and a sliding window at the top for ventilation, as most people seemed to be smokers then. Corridor trains would have a toilet at one end and slam doors at each end. A slam door would always have a window with a leather strap to lower it down. You could open the door from inside by moving a catch to one side but I sometimes found it easier to drop the window open and twist the door catch outside the door to open it.

Many local people will remember the Club Trips organised by Penistone Working Men's Club (now gone), which emptied the town on trip days. I remember counting eight railway coaches on one trip and was told that two trains had been needed at one time.

The top-left rainy picture was after the line was closed to passenger traffic but still open for freight. Until a new entrance was built on the Sheffield platform, access to the Huddersfield line was via the old main entrance, along the platform and around the corner at the end. The top-middle and top-right pictures from Richard White are not dated. The puthering smoke was Cammel Laird's contribution to global warming before it became fashionable to cut down pollution.

Lower-left and lower-middle pictures came from Peter Lawford in Canada (Many thanks, Peter). The lower-right picture, "Rompticle Crossing", is where Roper House Lane (the lane which goes south and west from the top of Thurgoland Bank) crosses the old railway line. (Thanks to Alan Reed for that info).