Out & About …

… on the North York Moors, or wherever I happen to be.

Great Ayton Weighbridge

I heard earlier this week that the demolition of this small building in the old goods yard at Great Ayton railway station was imminent. Yesterday’s snow might have given it a few days reprieve. It’s an old weighbridge and buried in the tangled undergrowth is, I am told, the weighing mechanism built by Henry Pooley & Sons Ltd. To its left, also due for demolition, are the old coal staithes. The building is not architecturally significant and there seem to be already many examples of Pooley weighing machines in the collections in the various science museums. But it does seem a shame, but that’s progress.

The goods yard has been fenced off and left to revert to nature for must be twenty years now, perhaps longer. A potential brownfield site for a few houses. The goods depot probably dates from shortly after 1868 when passenger services began on the Morton Carr to Battersby line opened four years earlier to shorten the distance for the Rosedale ironstone traffic to the furnaces at Middlesbrough. A goods train delivered coal to the yard which was then redistributed to the local public and also to Great Ayton’s gasworks. The station master took the profits, a perk of the job. In 1962 Great Ayton station became an unmanned halt with the end of goods services. Road transport took over for coal deliveries.




Open Space Web-Map builder Code









Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *