tarboat's photos with the keyword: rail

Early railway relics from the Cheshire coalfield. The lightweight plate at the top is from Poynton Collieries and may date from the late 1830s. The lower fragment was used on a line running from the Nelson Pit in Adlington. In neither place have any stone blocks been found and it may be that the lines were laid on wooden sleepers.

A recent discovery at Endon Wharf, Kerridge, is a piece of fishbelly rail from the tramroad built by William Clayton in the later 1830s to carry stone from his Endon Quarries to the sawmill by the Macclesfield Canal. The rails are 6ft long and fixed into the chairs with an iron pin as a wedge. The chairs were mounted onto the stone sleeper blocks using two spikes. Excavation of some track left in situ has revealed that the gauge of this tramway was 3ft 6ins.

The landowner advised me that there had once been an adit from which the Sweet seam was worked above Commonside in Macclesfield. This is likely to have been in the mid-nineteenth century and there is little left of the entrance. However, a short distance away this piece of wrought iron bridge rail is a tangible survivor of the mine.