UK - Engineers find mystery rail bridge under road

[John Ashworth]

Engineers find mystery bridge under the road
The Bolton News
12:30pm Saturday 9th August 2008

By Julian Thorpe »

A MYSTERIOUS railway bridge has been unearthed by gas engineers digging up a road.

National Grid workers were preparing to upgrade a gas main in Raikes Lane when they struck iron.

The large metal panel was part of an old single-track railway bridge that had been buried beneath the street — but Bolton Council says it has no record of it.

A council spokesman said: “Although council records go back more than 30 years, to the days of the Greater Manchester County Council, the structure’s existence was unknown.”

The bridge is about four metres wide and at least 20 metres long.

Engineers have found one end of the structure, on the northern side of Raikes Lane, but are unsure how far it extends under the road.

It has thick sandstone walls joined by a cast-iron span.

The council has now declared the iron section of the bridge is unsafe, so National Grid engineers will break it up and remove it before filling the gap between the stone walls with concrete.

A National Grid contractor on the site, who asked not to be named, said he thought the bridge was Victorian and may have serviced a nearby colliery.

Great Lever Colliery was sunk nearby in about 1828, but was closed down in 1921 due to the cost of pumping two million gallons of water out of the pit every 24 hours.

Neil Herriot, aged 60, of Croft Gate, Harwood, who has been a train driver for 45 years, said the bridge was probably more than 100 years old.

He said: “The railway has never been anywhere near there as far as I’m aware.

“The ideal thing would be to take it out bit by bit and put it together again. It’s all part of our industrial history”

“That’s how a lot of things are discovered — they come by accident.

“If they hadn’t been digging the road there it could’ve been there for another 100 years.”

A council spokesman said yesterday that the road would be closed from 6am today until Monday. Diversions are in place.

julian.thorpe@theboltonnews.co.uk