#railway viaduct

[gentlemanpixelator]

Luxembourg. Viaduc du Bisserweg.

[thekeytothehighway]

viaduct...

[connorphilpphotography]

The Jacobite, Glenfinnan Viaduct

[scavengedluxury]

Landwasser viaduct, 1909. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Loulla viaduct on the La Mure railway line, Dauphiné region of France

French vintage postcard

[londonedge]

Poyser Street, Bethnal Green

This street is so narrow it is able to pass through just half an arch of the railway viaduct

[weirdowithaquill]

Traintober 2023: Day 9 - Viaduct

The Viaduct has a Story Behind It:

The Maron Viaduct stands as a testament to the Sodor and Mainland Railway’s poor financial decisions, stretching across the gorge between the town it’s named after and the rails to Cronk, the remains of a failed attempt by the old railway to build a railway to connect the island’s capital at Suddery to Barrow-in-Furness on the mainland.

The company had agreed to a 75-25 split with the Wellsworth and Suddery Railway on the other side of the gorge to build the viaduct, paying a massive lump sum of money they did not have to begin construction on what they believed would be the company’s salvation.

Neil disagreed. He saw the bridge for what it was: a vanity project by desperate men. “Too big to fail” they said. Neil wondered if they would ever come to regret those words. They certainly didn’t seem to mind when the bills kept piling up. Every other week, it seemed like something was going wrong – though in the beginning, they barely noticed.

At first, it was just tools vanishing in the night, small enough that it was not essential to the construction site and able to be written off as petty theft – but then, a stick of dynamite went off by itself. Neil wasn’t sure why they even had dynamite – he was told it was to remove boulders deep in the gorge; he thought that it should’ve been kept down there instead, and not up with the rest of their supplies.

An entire hut filled with tools went up in flames, the explosion sending debris shooting across the work site. Neil was just thankful it had happened in the late evening, when he had been leaving the site with the workmen. The men were shaken, but unharmed. Neil hurried away with the coaches, not wanting to look back.

He wasn't quite sure what he was going to see. 

The next week, a line of trucks Neil was shunting were diverted onto a siding leading to the edge of the gorge, a coupling snapping when the little engine tried to brake the train to a stop before it all went over. Three trucks kept rolling, and despite Neil whistling a warning, not everyone could get clear of the trucks before they went hurtling over the edge. They smashed down the side of the gorge, splintering and fracturing and shooting shards of wood everywhere, while their contents scattered out over the river. Mangled pieces of metal and splintered wood came raining down. 

Four men lost their lives, leaving Neil assaulted with nightmares that had his boiler run dry when the stars glinted high above them in the sky.

And yet it did not end.

The crane broke, more dynamite went off. The rope basket carrying tools and men across the gorge snapped, sending the basket crashing into the gorge, smashing to smithereens against the jagged rocks below. Every single time, Neil willingly turned a blind eye, and every night, Neil sat awake in his shed and wondered if it was worth praying to the human god. There was something deeply wrong with that gorge. 

Stories began to circulate, of the figure of a man who just wasn’t there. He wore clothing of the previous millennia, and he screamed and cursed at the bridge from afar. The men swore they saw him, standing just at the furthest point of the gorge visible to the railway. Neil felt an uncomfortable presence around the site – he felt like an intruder. They were not wanted here. 

The Wellsworth and Suddery Railway pulled out of the agreement. The losses were mounting, and the Elsbridge tramway was offering a far more lucrative offer for amalgamation and tunnel building to a harbour on the far side of the island, in the Irish Sea. Skarloey said it was a place called ‘Tidmouth’, and that somewhere on that side of the island another little railway ran, with an engine almost as old as the pair. Neil didn’t believe him – the terrain on that side of the island only grew rougher, less habitable. The shepherds who took their sheep into the foothills to graze said it was impassable, that the only way up to the Ancient City of Peel Godred was through the valley – but the people of Peel Godred refused to sell their land to the S&MR to build up that way. They said that it was old land, full of ghosts and demons borne of heretics cursed to forever wander the earth in search of a salvation that never came. 

Neil wondered if the figure the men saw in the gorge was one of these ghosts. From the way he acted, he could have been a demon. The fire that broke out and burnt the supports to ash and brought an entire pillar crumbling down was testament to that. 

Still, the S&MR refused to back down from this folly. They continued trying to stretch their viaduct across the gorge, even as the bills rose ever higher. Tools continued to go missing, dynamite exploded and damaged the blocks, trucks moved on their own, derailing and falling into the gorge.

And then, it happened.

Neil remembered being there, that silent night. He’s been ordered up to the construction site to drop off a line of trucks, to replace the ones filled with waste that had derailed and blocked half the line the night before. As he approached, he noticed a thick column of smoke blast up into the night sky.

“There’s a train coming on the other side,” his driver noted. “But the W&S said they weren’t going to run beyond Maron,” Neil replied slowly, peering into the darkness.

An engine rounded the bend, face white as a sheet and eyes wide with horror. Fire was bursting out on all sides, and on the footplate stood a man in clothing from nearly a millennia prior, cackling with glee as the engine roared towards the gorge. The poor engine looked as though he was on a one-way trip to the underworld, and he screamed and pleaded in horror; the man in his cab refused to respond. 

Neil could only shut his eyes and try to block out the explosion that came from the engine’s boiler rupturing and crumpling on impact. An entire section of the bridge shattered, crumpling in on itself and burying the destroyed engine. 

They finally stopped trying to build the bridge after that. The costs had grown too steep, and both the S&MR and the W&S could not afford to go near it. The rails were ripped up, and the remains of the structure were left to fade away. The two companies met similar fates: The W&S was merged with the TK&ER and bored a tunnel to Tidmouth, while the S&MR declared bankruptcy, and sold off all its assets. Both companies were decimated by the events of the construction of the Maron Viaduct, leaving little but their histories and their rail lines behind them…

At least, until the admiralty bought the three railways in 1915 and began construction once more. But before they could, they unearthed a skeleton nestled in the river at the base of the gorge, preserved in the sediment built up by the rushing water. He wore the tattered remains of what may have been a Viking and looked as if he had been attempting to crawl out of the water when he succumbed to his fate.

They moved his remains to a parish at Wellsworth; and performed several rites over the bridge before beginning construction once more. Neil stayed well away – he knew it wasn’t safe.

Today, the Maron Viaduct stands tall and proud over the gorge; and inscribed in its pillars is a single name, written in runes no man can read. No one knows how they got there, nor does anyone know what they say. But it’s said, if you touch the viaduct at the very moment the sun dips below the horizon, you will meet a ghost, who will impart on you your fate.

Neil refuses to go near the viaduct and discover if the legend is true. 

And it's a good thing he does... 

Back to the Master Post

[richs-pics]

Railway bridge, Arnside

[opelman]

But if I should become a stranger you know that it would make me more than sad... by Treflyn Lloyd-Roberts Via Flickr: Caledonian Railway pair 419 and 828 steam south over Avon Viaduct on the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway under gloomy skies at the end of an "In Search of Steam"/Scottish Railway Preservation Society photo charter. Locomotives: Caledonian Railway 439 Class 0-4-4T 419 and 812 Class 0-6-0 828. Location: Avon Viaduct, Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway, Falkirk, Scotland.

[gentlemanpixelator]

Chaumont. le Viaduc.

[maybeusha]

another sketch for a painting that got put on the backburner

[sometimeslondon]

The Greenwich Railway Viaduct built in 1834 at Druid Street in Bermondsey contrasts with the 21st century Shard

[scavengedluxury]

Railway viaduct, Biatorbágy, 1932. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Railway viaduct in Chaumont, Champagne region of France

French vintage postcard

[londonedge]

“All of nature rests in the hands of man’s wisdom, let us not be fools”

More of the murals of endangered animals in Mile End

[s38s73r]

The railway viaduct above Angarrack, Hayle, Cornwall /Kernow