Castleford railway station

Infobox UK station
name = Castleford
code = CFD


manager = Northern Rail
locale = Castleford
borough = City of Wakefield
pte = West Yorkshire (Metro)
zone = 3
usage0405 = 0.293
usage0506 = 0.312
usage0607 = 0.304
start =
platforms = 1

Castleford railway station is an unstaffed railway station serving the town of Castleford in West Yorkshire. It lies on the Hallam and the Pontefract Lines convert|17|km|mi south east of Leeds.

Although originally built as a through station, regular passenger services beyond Castleford towards York were discontinued in January 1970. Today, all services reverse in the station, arriving and departing from a single platform. Freight traffic runs through the station. The footbridge and platform 2 are disused although platform 2 was brought back into use temporarily during the Leeds First project in 2002 when Transpennine services between York and Huddersfield were diverted to avoid engineering work in Leeds, routed via Church Fenton, Castleford and Wakefield Kirkgate. The route from Church Fenton is occasionally used as an emergency diversionary route.

Metro, the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, has been developing plans to relocate Castleford Bus Station to a new site next to the railway station, and to create a fully-integrated and staffed transport interchange. Provisional approval for the £14.5m project was granted in December, 2004, with works due to be completed by 2010.

History

The current station was built by the North Eastern Railway in 1871 to replace an earlier one 400m to the east built by the York and North Midland Railway on their line from York to Normanton and opened on 1 July 1840 [Body, p51] . A short time later an east to north curve was constructed between Whitwood and Methley junctions (the latter on the North Midland Railway main line) to create the first through route between York and Leeds - it would remain the primary route between the two cities until 1869 and also carry services between Leeds and from Hull for a number of years thanks to the machinations of George Hudson.

The town gained a second station at Cutsyke in 1860, courtesy of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway whose line from Pontefract Monkhill to Methley Junction (and hence Leeds) had opened in 1849 and passed over the Y&NMR line near Whitwood Junction. Further construction work by both companies saw lines built to Lofthouse (on the main line from Wakefield Westgate to Leeds) via Stanley (the Methley Joint line) in 1865 (1 May 1869 for passenger traffic), to Garforth via Ledston in 1878 (giving passengers the choice of no fewer than three alternative routes to Leeds) and a curve linking the Y&NM and L&Y routes in the town two years later. This latter piece of line was seldom used for much of its life (and was closed on two different occasions) but now forms an important part of the line towards Knottingley.

Thus by the end of the nineteenth century the station (by now known as Castleford Central) had an impressive range of services to choose from, with regular links to Leeds, Wakefield and on towards Manchester Victoria through the Calder Valley as well as to York. Longer distance destinations (including Sheffield, Derby, Birmingham and London) were also available by means of a change at Normanton.

By the early 1950s however the local network began to decline, with the Garforth line the first to lose its passenger trains on 22 January 1951. The Methley Joint line fell victim to the Beeching Axe on 2 November 1964 [Body, pp51-52] , whilst the L&Y station at Cutsyke suffered a similar fate on 7 October 1968 - trains from Pontefract thereafter using the aforementioned curve to reach Central, where they reversed before continuing to Leeds via Whitwood Junction (although the direct line remained in use for freight until 21 April 1981).

Another significant change was the withdrawal of services on the original Y&NMR line between York and Wakefield on 5 January 1970, leaving the station to be served only by trains on the the Pontefract line (although a handful of summer dated trains from Wakefield to York and Scarborough continued to run until the mid 1980s) and creating the current situation where all scheduled trains calling there approach from the west, use a single platform and have to reverse to continue their journeys. One more positive development was the re-routing of trains on the Hallam line via the town in 1988, which reinstated the link with Wakefield and also gave passengers access to direct trains to Barnsley and Sheffield.

ervices

Monday to Saturdays, there is a half-hourly service from Castleford to Leeds with an hourly service to Sheffield via Barnsley ("Hallam Line") and an hourly service to Knottingley ("Pontefract Line").

On Sundays there is an hourly service to Leeds and a two-hourly service to both Sheffield and Knottingley.

Notes

References

*Body, G. (1988), "PSL Field Guides - Railways of the Eastern Region Volume 2", Patrick Stephens Ltd, Wellingborough, ISBN 1-85260-072-1

External links

* [http://www.wymetro.com/ProjectsAndPlans/SchemesUnderDevelopment/061107-1.htm Information from Metro about the new travel interchange]