Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Howarth
Hi Tony,
The orange coloured stream you mention was probably Slackey Brook which ran all the way along at the back of the railway where the land fell away sharply into the area we called "Down Beggars". It ran into the old sewerage works which was disused when I went but a great place to explore. It has all been filled in and landscaped now and new houses are even starting to encroach upon the area from the Agecroft road end. The rush hour that you mention was a hectic time for us after school as we would congregate on the Swinton side of Pendlebury tunnel and wait for the Blackpool and Southport trains to go through. The high point of the evening came when the Windermere express came through. We would go down to the bottom of the embankment and watch for it pounding up Pendlebury Bank looking through the tunnel. it was very often a Britannia Class Pacific and I guess I must have seen almost half of the Class on that express.
Ian
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Hi Ian
Your posting evokes great nostalgia in me! I grew up in Pendlebury, just off Hospital Road and went to Grosvenor Road Primary and then Wardley Grammar School. In the mid-sixties I was mad keen on train spotting and used to go every evening to what we called 'The Sandhills' on the Pendlebury side at the top of Agecroft Road. The star attraction was, as you mention, the early evening service from Manchester Exchange to Windermere which was almost always hauled by a 'Brit'. By this time they were pretty neglected, although only twelve or thirteen years old - no trace of BR Green under the black grime, missing name plates and sometimes emitting jets of steam where they should not have emitted jets of steam! Nevertheless they were a credit to Robert Riddles as they stormed up the incline from Pendleton with a plume of smoke rising from the chimney like a small nuclear explosion.
The old L&Y fast tracks must have long gone, but I do remember that the 72 inch diameter Haweswater Aqueduct crossed Agecroft Road on the lower side of the railway, and that one night in the sixties, after heavy rain in the Lake District it burst and flooded the Dauntsey Road Estate where my grandparents lived!
I also remember the wilderness of the old sewerage farm and the spoil heaps between there and Lumn's Lane where we used to play, strictly against our parents' instructions. I used to hunt for fosils in the slag heaps. They were very numerous, usually of million-year old ferns.
One of my grandfathers washed buses at Fredrick Road Depot, while the other was a collier at Wheatsheaf Pit. My father was a tool-maker at Exide Batteries ('The Chloride') and my mum worked at the builders' merchant which was built on the site of the goods yard at Swinton Station.
I left Pendlebury in 1973 to go to university in London and have never returned.
Thank you all for re-kindling so many happy memories.