British Railways (London Midland Region)

Demolished

Notes: Eastwood station - suffixed ‘Yorks’ to distinguish it from its namesake in Nottinghamshire - opened with the Manchester & Leeds (M&L) Railway in 1840. Passing through Calderdale, with its steep valley-side slopes and narrow floor occupied by the River Calder, the Rochdale Canal, the turnpike road, scattered houses and mills, the M&L engineers faced considerable challenges inserting the route of the railway. At Eastwood the line was squeezed between the main road and the near-vertical valley side on a narrow ledge created by excavating on the uphill side and embanking on the other. The station was placed on this unpromising site, and Biddle in Victorian Stations (1973) selected it as an example of how the geographical constraints of a site could produce quite a remarkable station. He writes:

‘Eastwood … was built on a shelf above the valley. The platforms were low, barely above rail level, narrow in the extreme, and staggered on either side of a level crossing reached by a steep road. There was no space for platform structures, so the station offices were built into the hillside on the opposite side of the road which, after crossing the line, turned sharply parallel to it. The station existed in this primitive form for over a century, until closure in 1951.’

The location chosen for the station was on land acquired from the estate of the Eastwood family adjacent to Cockden Mill, which they both owned and operated; indeed, the presence of Cockden Mill might have been the reason for a station being built here. When the first Manchester & Leeds Railway Prospectus was published in 1831 Mr Thomas Eastwood was a director. The station was built on the original site of Eastwood Chapel, but little evidence of its existence remains. A large number of cottages were built right down to the site of the old Myrtle Grove Chapel, and the old inn at Bottoms. These two sites were absorbed when the railway was built and the chapel and the new Station House Inn constructed in their stead, the railway company greatly assisting in the provision of funds. Eastwood was little more than a hamlet at this time.

The main building was placed just beyond the north-east of the down (Leeds-bound) platform and included accommodation for the stationmaster and the booking office. It was a particularly plain two-storey structure that could have been plucked from any of the settlements in upper Calderdale, built of coursed, locally quarried thin sandstone blocks under a pitched slate roof. The window openings were unadorned, but the central doorway was sheltered by an angular hood-mould. The relatively short upstairs windows gave the building rather a pinched appearance, and this was emphasised by the single-storey office and waiting room range to the north-east, also of sandstone, whose roof-line was almost as high as its two-storeyed neighbour; the window and door openings were much taller on the single-storey section, again contributing to the unbalanced composition. Altogether the station building, fitting snugly into a sheer rock face, was ugly but fascinating. The signal box stood several yards north-east of the station building, set into a stone-lined recess in the cutting.

On the up (Manchester-bound) platform was a small, open timber pent-roofed shelter which extended a short distance back from the narrow platform. Gas lighting was provided. Despite the constraints of the site, space was found for goods sidings and coal drops north-east of the station, and a loop was installed opposite the Leeds-bound platform. It is fortunate that several photographers recorded the station for posterity.

Despite its unpretentious appearance this station it has been suggested that it was the local one for the wealthy and influential Fielden family, some of whom served on the LYR board, one being Chairman, and that one of the directors of the LYR lived at Eastwood station house; one source asserts that he would require trains to make unscheduled stops at Eastwood so that he could attend meetings in Manchester. Todmorden was the town where the three dominant Fielden brothers lived in the mid nineteenth century and exerted enormous influence.

The timetable below shows the service on the day of opening of the Manchester terminus at Victoria station; this replaced the Oldham Road terminus. Eastwood’s weekday timetable is distinctly unbalanced (in contrast to that of its neighbour Hebden Bridge) permitting only morning travel in the Manchester direction; this would presumably have been sufficient for businessmen and shoppers to reach the city, with a wider choice of return trains. Leeds services worked via Normanton; Hunslet Lane station closed in 1851.

In February 1863 Bradshaw indicates that Eastwood station enjoyed a modest service of trains calling at irregular intervals, but with more balanced up and down direction departures than in the 1844 timetable:

Destinations of trains are not shown clearly in Bradshaw

An accident occurred at Eastwood on 18 August 1874 resulting from a luggage train being shunted into a siding with the train buffer left protruding onto the main line. An excursion train collided with the luggage train injuring 20 people. Another unfortunate incident occurred here in 1906 when Harry Lumb, who lived at Charlestown, was struck by an express train and killed instantly. In 1912 a train crash occurred on the Charlestown curve, a short distance north-east of Eastwood station. There were three fatalities, but four bodies recovered from the site as an occupied coffin was being carried on the train.

From the station’s opening until the beginning of the twentieth century Eastwood’s stationmasters were:

Eastwood station was owned by the LYR until January 1922 when that company was absorbed by the London & North Western Railway. In January 1923 at the ‘Grouping’ the LNWR became part of the new London, Midland & Scottish Railway. The table below shows departures from Eastwood during its brief spell in LNWR ownership. The service is frequent, though at irregular intervals, and provides several trains suitable for business travel towards Manchester in the morning though fewer by which to return in the early evening.

† Train possibly divides en route to serve several destinations: not entirely clear in the timetable

The ticket clerk during the 1930s is recorded as being Edith Pilling.

The A646 road runs parallel and close to the railway between Hebden Bridge and Todmorden, and by the 1930s frequent motor buses between these towns ran through Eastwood, gradually winning passengers from the railway. Eastwood survived into the British Railways (BR) era, which commenced in January 1948, when the station was allocated to the London Midland (LM) Region. In April 1950 a major revision of BR regions transferred a large portion of the West Riding lines in the Leeds, Bradford and Halifax area from the LM to the North Eastern (NE) Region; Eastwood remained in the LM but the boundary with the NE was only a short distance north-east of the station.

In the face of dwindling traffic, the station closed to passengers in December 1951, but goods and coal traffic continued to be handled until May 1964. The last stationmaster was George Logan.

The station buildings were still standing, though derelict, in 1972; they had been demolished by 1974. The signal box remained in use until 1973 when Preston Power Signal Box took over control of this section of line, and it was subsequently removed

Click here for a brief history of the Copy Pit line
See also Copy Pit Route Collieries

See other stations on the Copy Pit line: Burnley Manchester Road (1st site), Burnley Manchester Road (2nd), Towneley, Holme, Portsmouth (Lancs), Cornholme, Stansfield Hall & Hebden Bridge (still open)