HEYWOOD: PROTOTYPE WITH POTENTIAL

For wagon enthusiasts, few locations offer greater opportunity to display a rolling stock collection than a wagon works. David Ratcliffe presents his idea.

Freight-only branch lines often make interesting prototypes on which to base a model railway, especially if, as at Heywood in Lancashire, they served a wagon works, thus affording the opportunity to run a very wide selection of rolling stock.

The railway first arrived at Heywood in April 1841, when the Manchester & Leeds Railway opened a 1¼-mile-long singletrack branch line from Castleton. In May 1848, the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, successors to the Manchester & Leeds, extended some four miles west to Bury.

Here, the branch made an end-on connection with the Liverpool & Bury Railway, while the Lancashire & Yorkshire also built the Bury

East Fork, providing a connection to the Manchester to Accrington line, which had been opened by the East Lancashire Railway in 1846. Most importantly, the chord gave access to Bury's principal station on Bolton Street and the lines north to Accrington and Rawtenstall.

Back at Heywood, a new two-platform through station was built on the extension, the original terminus then becoming a goods depot, while three stabling sidings were laid just east of the new station. From these, a further line would kick back across Green Lane into Heywood Wagon Works after it opened in 1863, with the works growing to include a forge, wheel, machine and paint shops.

Both passenger and freight remained buoyant until the mid1960s, but in October 1967, general goods facilities were withdrawn at Heywood and three years later, passenger services also came to an end. However, the line was retained for freight traffic with a trip running each day from Brewery Sidings, Manchester, to Rawtenstall via Heywood and Bury Bolton Street. At this time, the trip, which would normally get to Rawtenstall at around 09:00, was usually powered by a Type 2 Class 24 or Class 25 locomotive but by the late 1970s, Type 4 motive power in the shape of a Class 40 or Class 47 had become the norm.

Much of the traffic handled by the trip comprised domestic coal, carried in BR 21T hopper wagons, which was destined for the British Fuels coal concentration depot at Rawtenstall but until September 1973 it also conveyed coal and pulp for the Yates Duxbury paper mills at Heap Bridge. The freight would also deliver the occasional load of M&EE stores to the Electric

Multiple Unit depot at Bury as well as serving the wagon works at Heywood, which, since 1954, had been a part of the Standard Wagon Company that also owned a similar wagon works at Reddish, near Stockport.

Something of an innovator in wagon design, the Standard Wagon Co. was successful in obtaining numerous orders from private industry, building a wide range of different wagon types. These included aggregate hoppers, car carriers, container flats and oil and chemical tanks, while in addition to new build, the works at Heywood also undertook the repair and modification of existing privately-owned wagons. Consequently, a considerable

variety of types, most often in just ones and twos, could appear in the freight trip from Brewery Sidings, with vehicles bound for Standard Wagon usually running through to Rawtenstall as it was easier to shunt the yard at Heywood on the return leg.

In 1972, the line north from Bury to Rawtenstall also lost its passenger service but the freight trip continued to served the coal depot at Rawtenstall until that finally closed on December 5th, 1980. The following February, a ‘Rossendale Farewell’ rail tour ran from Manchester to Rawtenstall, after which date the line between Bury and Heywood was taken out of use although it was left in situ. However, the section from

Castleton still remained in service to provide access to the Standard Wagon Co., but with no run-round loop available at Heywood, wagons destined for Standard would now be propelled along the single line from Castleton, the wagon company having both a Sentinel industrial locomotive and a selfpropelled rail-mounted Coles crane available to assist with the required shunting manoeuvres. Standard Wagon remained busy throughout the 1980s, with the company developing a number of new and innovative wagon designs such as the Redland Self-Discharge Train and the Thompson bogie side-tippers, but unfortunately, the early 1990s witnessed a steep decline in demand for new wagons and in consequence the Heywood works, which had been acquired by Powell Duffryn in 1989, closed after Christmas 1992.

However, the line from Castleton to Heywood and beyond would survive, subsequently being brought back into use in order to provide the East Lancashire Railway with a connection to the main line network, something it had lost when in 1991, the Manchester Victoria to Bury line via Prestwich was converted into the first route of the Greater Manchester Metrolink system. Having acquired the Bury to Castleton line, the East Lancashire Railway would build a new station at Heywood, the town's third, introducing a passenger service between Heywood and Bury Bolton Street in July, 2003.

A busy scene at Heywood in October 1988 as the crew of the Standard Wagon Co. Sentinel discuss their next move having just propelled two newly-built Conoco propylene tanks out of the works and into the old storage sidings. Meanwhile, 31183, which had arrived a short time earlier with the Speedlink trip from Castleton, awaits developments.

47117 arrives at Heywood on March 29th, 1988. It has propelled the single bogie container wagon the short distance down the branch from Heywood and will leave it in the sidings to the west of Green Lane. The track in the immediate foreground was the disused line to Bury, while the wagon is crossing the turnout that gave access to Standard Wagon.

Having lefts its wagon in the small yard to the west of Green Lane, Class 47117 heads back from Heywood to Castleton light engine on March 29th, 1988.

Three or four Blue Circle Cement PCAs would arrive at Heywood in the local trip every few days and, although they were normally unloaded directly into a waiting road vehicles, Blue Circle also positioned a static silo in the small yard.

Wagons for Standard Wagon would be left in any of the three former stabling sidings at Heywood, although for a few years during the mid 1980s, the southernmost of these sidings was used by Blue Circle as a small rail served cement terminal. In this April 1985 view, three PCA cement wagons await unloading beside the static silo, while on the other two sidings, a British Industrial Sand PAA, together with a Railease side-tipper PSA, china clay PRA and Class A bogie tank, all wait their turn to be moved into the works for repair.

Two new bogie aggregate hoppers, RMC17201 and RMC17202, stand alongside the main erecting shop at Heywood Wagon Works while waiting to be released into traffic on September 10, 1986.

Standard Wagon's 4wDH Sentinel (works No. S10003), which had previously been owned by the Bass brewery at Burton-on-Trent, shunts two Railease POA wagons at Heywood on February 26th, 1986. The POAs were part of a large fleet that had been built at Heywood a few years earlier and leased to British Steel for the carriage of steel scrap.

Privately-owned wagons would also come from all over the country to Heywood for repair. In this April 1985 view, a bogie Class A tank usually seen working from the Total Oil Refinery at Immingham waits its turn to enter the wagon works along side a two-axle PRA, a type used to carry china clay from Cornwall to Scotland.

31183 propels three withdrawn Railease owned PEA 'Tip-Air' wagons across Green Lane, Heywood, in October 1988.