Penistone

My sister-in-law had moved to be close to her daughter and grandchildren, up in the South Yorkshire hills. Penistone was completely new to me. I soon discovered that the new house that I was sitting in was built on land where Cammell Laird had previously made iron and steel.

I sat back and remembered our 1960s train spotting trips that started with the fog of smoke that greeted you, when you climbed upstairs on the number 10 bus. It was created by the Lairds workers, with their flat caps and butty boxes, who themselves had only been seated for the five minutes it had taken the bus to reach Stroude’s corner from the New Brighton terminus. Their first act had obviously been to open their tins of loose baccy and get their roll-up underway. When we got off at Hamilton Square and walked the few yards down to Birkenhead Woodside station, the men who had built the Ark Royal stayed on board for a few more minutes before starting their working day at the ship yard.

The former Yorkshire Iron and Steel works at Penistone had been constructed adjacent to the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, which became the Great Central Railway in 1897. It expanded onto the other side of the line, stretching just to where we now sat drinking tea and eating some of my niece’s excellent home-made cake.

We took a stroll along the track bed of the old GCR, the famous Woodhead route between Sheffield and Manchester, which is now a well-used walking and cycling trail. I had come this way once before, on the 4^th June 1963, when we were hauled over the Pennines and through the tunnel - on the route which had been electrified in 1953 - by Class EM2 [later Class 77] No. 27000 Electra. The line closed to passenger traffic in 1970 and then completely in 1981, so the whole electrification enterprise had been relatively short-lived.

The former GCR station buildings at Penistone are still standing and are partly occupied by small businesses. The track bed and platform edges are clearly discernible. The former junction with the Huddersfield route, which still operates as the “Penistone Line” from Sheffield via Barnsley, leaves the station on a sharp curve to the north as it approaches the dramatic Penistone viaduct.