Report - Healey Mills Depot & Marshalling Yard, Wakefield - January 2015

[Caldervale]

Knew this site for many years from 1935 as a youngster still juvenile in 1941 but in 1944 employed in the ex LMS built yard as a shunter until 1947 promotion to Guard
first at Mirfield, then Wakefield Kirkgate until transferred to the British Rail modernised yard. Those years 1941 - 1944 spent train recording at Horbury Station Box now just another cleared railway site. In the years mentioned was resident in Yorkshire which I left in 1965 only to return on social visits to relations. Caldervale

 

[Hydro]

Nice report! when i was younger i used to hang about this rail yard a lot. used to be loads of trains in there but now there is only the few carriages by the looks

 

[Will Knot]

Nice photos Great report

 

[Black Box]

Me and a mate were there last week. We were quickly escorted off site by Network Rail, then BTP turned up! They spared us a £60 fine though thankfully. Apparently Network Rail spotted us from the signalling box at the Dewsbury / Thornhill end of the site

The friendly chap from Network Rail was saying they're possibly on about re-opening the site in the next few years.

 

[stepin]

the re-opening has been shelved , everyones skint

 

[Miss Mayhem]

Cracking stuff, you have really nice shots there

 

[opendoor]

At a loose end and in the area whilst searching for GeoVW's 'in renovation' camper that has been shifted from industrial unit to industrial unit we found ourselves with a spare hour and being but 2 mins away from here we had a blustery walk around.

Healey Mills opened in 1963 in attempt to modernise wagon-load traffic. It replaced a dozen smaller yards in the area and its purpose was to improve the efficiency of sorting and marshalling wagons into trains before sending them off to their destination. The yards featured hump-shunting, in which wagons were pushed over a ‘hump’, freewheeled into the required siding, and braked using special retarders next to the rails - all controlled from a centralised operations tower.

A purpose-built diesel depot opened alongside the yards at the end of 1966 and the two facilities saw round the clock activity with a claimed capacity of 4,000 wagons per day. Situated to the west of Wakefield, Healey Mills was ideally located for sending and receiving trains to all parts of the country, as well as handling the large number of local coal trains at the time.

But wagon-load railfreight came under increasing threat in the 1970s and 1980s due to competition from road transport. Then a double blow came with the decline of the Yorkshire coal industry and resultant reduction in coal trains, which had once formed up to 50 percent of traffic at Healey Mills.

As a result, the depot lost its own allocation of locomotives in 1984 and the marshalling yards closed in 1987 - although both were still used for stabling locomotives and trains until the early 2000s.

The redundant sidings were then used to store long lines of withdrawn Class 37, 47, 56 and 58 locomotives until 2010, after which the only operations at Healey Mills were for crew changes of passing freight trains. Of course all of these engines have now been scrapped and only a number of old bits of rolling stock are sided up.

The site is fairly sparse yet photogenic and there's also an old maintenance building that was accessible yet stripped. Photos:

The yard has been purchased by GBR now, they start work on it after Xmas I’m told