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The Hidden Viaduct of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway

The Hidden Viaduct of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway The Old Railway Line On a personal level, I am familiar with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, or at least the disused sections around Preston and South Ribble.  I used to cross a section near Bamber Bridge on may way to school in the mid nineteen-seventies, and I am sure that there were still a few goods trains pulling loads of oil tankers crossing Brownedge Road (Brownedge Lane) that occasionally stopped us if I'd gone to school on the 113 bus.  Passenger services had long since stopped and when the goods trains had also ceased, the rail company ('British Rail') quite quickly removed the infrastructure.  This was definitely the rails and sleepers, but perhaps not the ballast straight away.  From that point forward, it became the playground of a few of the local children, myself included. Brownedge Level Crossing, Bamber Bridge around 1905 At that point, we often would have adventures in the remains of Todd Lan
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The Delph in the River Ribble by Avenham Park

The Delph in the River Ribble by Avenham Park Over the years, I have always been slightly confused when people mention the the necessity of 'divers' when investigating things in the River Ribble by Avenham Park, adjacent to the Old Tram Road bridge.  However, after being momentarily perplexed by it, my train of thought often moved onto something else.  More recently, when researching the history of the Lancaster Canal, I was led to an account of divers (again) fishing something out of the River Ribble in the same location.  This time, I decided to figure out why they would be needed. The answer is that there is a significantly deep 'Delph' in the River Ribble.  Strangely, whilst I thought that word was generally part of everyone's vocabulary, it turn out not to be.  I didn't pop up in online dictionaries when I did a web search.  Relatively locally, I have had conversations with people about 'Eccy Delph' (Eccleston Delph).  It turns out that Delph  comes
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FAREWELL TO THE SUMMIT - Lancaster Canal Summit Branch and Tramroad

FAREWELL TO THE SUMMIT The following text is taken from a 1968 publication entitled " FAREWELL TO THE SUMMIT " that was given to me by a friend who has a mutual interest in Canal related history. It was written by Ian Moss to accompany a visit to the Southern section of the Lancaster Canal towards Walton Summit and the adjoining Tram Road to Preston.  At the time, both were in a state of disuse, but were much more visible than today.  At the time of the visit, the construction of the M61 Motorway was underway, and this highway cut through the canal.  Thus, putting it out of action forever. I am not sure if there are any copyright issues with sharing the text.  My understanding is that it isn't a formal book publication with an ISBN etc.  I am only trying to get this information out to a wider audience, and share an account from over half a century ago.  If you know otherwise, please let me know.  If is causing anyone an issue, I can remove it.  The text has been modified
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Fall Of Thirteen Arches of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway.

Fall Of Thirteen Arches,  of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway. Following on from my post about the Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge", I put the old picture looking from Miller Park and my photograph of the top of a buried arch on a local social media group.  That solicited a comment from a group member that pointed towards an old news article. Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge" This news article revealed that there had been problems with the arches during the construction, and this actually led to thirteen of them collapsing.  It was entitled "Fall of Thirteen Arches of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway".  It came from the Preston Guardian published on Saturday 27th October 1849.  I ran the scanned image of the newspaper extract through an online OCR (optical character recognition) software process and converted the image in
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