Tiffield Station Site

[Richard Woods]

We have many unanswered and unanswerable questions regarding the Station site at Tiffield, but actually definitively pinpointing a location could be something for us to get our teeth into. A handful of photo's of the station site that we have on the website seem to indicate the site being just to the east of Bridge 7 Eastcote Road, as opposed to the Bridge Numbers Document pinpointing the location to be between Bridge 9 Caldecote Road and Bridge 8 cattle creep.

 

I visited the section of line between Bridge 9 and Bridge 8 yesterday to get a look for myself, albeit very overgrown, and I found that the line goes from being in a steep cutting at Bridge 9 to an embankment before Bridge 8, which would be impractical for a station, which means the idea of the station site being between Bridges 9 and 8 has got to be false, with the site being east of Bridge 7 Eastcote being much more likely as it's on a level. Discuss folks! I'd like to hear your knowledge and thoughts!

[Dick Bodily]

Can confirm that there was a foot crossing between Blakesley Bridge 24 and Dunkley's (aka. Cattle) Bridge 25. It was much nearer to Bridge 24 than Bridge 25 not many yards west of the up home signal, but obviously the quoted distances don't make sense. My 'guesstimate' would be around 8 miles & 46 chains. It carried a much contested public footpath from a point half way down School Lane right through a property's garden, then through Blakesley Hall grounds to Woodend. Squire C W Bartholomew constructed a metalled footpath along side the Woodend Road from a point near Blakesley Station to Woodend, then declared that the footpath that crossed the E&WJR had been closed. It is doubtful that he got official approval for this 'closure'. Certain villagers continued to use the footpath and the crossing just to make their point but it largely died out of use and may well have been unofficially fenced off. CWB was a major shareholder in the E&WJR and carried a lot of clout. Many years after CWB's death in 1919, people (mainly children) began reusing the footpath and crossing in the 1950s, usually as a short cut to the village cricket ground and this annoyed the owner of the property whose garden it crossed so much that he successfully went through the official channels to get the footpath and the crossing closed. So from around the late '50s onwards in BR days there was no longer any foot crossing or footpath. Undeterred, the children of the village made their own unofficial crossing from a field at the end of School Lane much nearer to bridge 25, frequently crawling under the couplings of up goods trains held at the up home signal much to the consternation of those trains' crews.