My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

What Will Preston look like in 1992? A slideshow from 1972 Preston Guild predicting what Preston would be like in 1992 No, it's not the first of the 'Forward to the Past' trilogy. This is a bit like watching an old Sci-Fi film predicting the future 50 years after it has been made. No, we're still not buzzing around in flying cars, thankfully. View West from Ladywell, towards the Docks and Penwortham Power Station This short film, which is  is effectively a forerunner of a PowerPoint presentation before personal computers had been conceived, let alone Microsoft software (...am I allowed to advertise on here? Other reputable software providers are also available, etc.), didn't quite make it to 3 minutes before they were getting it wrong.  Do you think that we will get a University? The car: It's a good servant, but the more concessions we make to its use, the more it becomes our master. Hmmm. we still haven't cracked that nut. The proposal for the River Rib

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

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