Located close to the Ellesmere Colliery, the Walkden Yard ultimately
became the NCB Central Workshops for Lancashire. From here the workshops
served the Bridgewater Trustees' collieries, providing engineering
support as well as maintaining the numerous railway locomotives and the
many hundreds of wagons that the company owned. Opened in 1878, Walkden
Yard transferred to the National Coal Board upon nationalization after
the Second World War and its importance grew as it served the other
Lancashire collieries too. At Walkden there were a machine shop,
joiners' shop, electricians' shop, paint shop, tinsmiths', locomotive
repair shop, wagon sheds and wagon machine shop. The yard itself
employed hundreds of men and boys but was closed in 1986 with the
decline of the Lancashire coalfield. A housing estate now sits atop the
site of the Walkden yard and it is hard to remember that the site once
serviced the many locomotives that belonged to the NCB, or that the Coal
Board and its predecessors operated many locomotives over their own
lines as well as the railway company ones and that a huge industry was
maintained at Walkden yard, repairing locomotives and rolling stock. In
this book, Alan Davies tells the story of the Walkden yard and the
locomotives of the Lancashire coalfield.
