Peterborough (North) was, as you may have worked out from the name, one of two stations in the town, the other being (East), the Great Eastern's rather squalid station. (North) was the Great Northern's, the main line from London to Scotland, and, because the parent company owned half, it was also the south-western terminus of the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway.
Peterborough had some of the country's largest and most impressive freight handling and marshalling yards, but its passenger facilities were cramped and inadequate despite the prestige of much of the traffic.
In that shot (above) we are looking northwards, under the overall roof which mainly serves to deepen the sense of gloom.
M&GN trains, in case you were wondering, left from a platform at the far northern end of the station. Notice the piles of parcels and mail sacks, some just casually dumped. In the far distance you can just make out Spittal Bridge:
And here we are standing on Spittal Bridge and looking back southwards, the station in the distance, some of the numerous engineering buildings in the foreground:
I love these shots: they feel like another age (and, I suppose, since most of them are more than half a century old, they probably are).
Postscript:
Someone has asked whether they could have remembered correctly a train journey "East-West ... to Cambridge via P'boro East and Huntingdon's other station". Here's an extract from a 1961 railway map. Huntingdon is in the bottom-left quadrant:
I can't see any way to make such a journey. I don't think a train service was routed north from Huntingdon to Peterborough (North), but if it was it would need to reverse at Peterborough (North) before heading eastwards via March and Ely, then turning south to Cambridge. I think most people would have travelled south from Huntingdon and changed onto the Oxford-Cambridge line, avoiding Peterborough altogether, but I also suspect that the first route would require a change of trains at least at Peterborough.
From that map you can also see the gaping hole left by the closure of the M&GN system just two years earlier, connections between Spalding and King's Lynn, or Lynn via Fakenham and Melton Constable to Norwich and Cromer but a distant memory.
5 comments:
Many thanks indeed - it was I who asked. I've only been through the station once, at high speed en route to Edinburgh. But I have vague recollections of an extraordinarily slow East-West trip to Cambridge via P'boro East and Huntingdon's other station (is that possible, or is dementia setting in?)
The station was completely remodelled and rebuilt in the 1970s -- until then everything, including non-stop Anglo-Scottish expresses had to slow to 10mph on their journey through the station's notorious dog-legged track.
By the time you made your high speed journey Peterborough (East) was long-demolished.
I've tried to answer your other question in a postscript in the post itself. In fairness to your memory, most cross-country journeys were extraordinarily slow (the M&GN's crack "expresses" averaged less than 30mph, and some other trains barely made it to 20mph average speeds -- eg, King's Lynn to Nottingham, 78 miles in, er, 4 hours).
Thanks, LeDuc, source of so much wisdom. I well recollect the easier way on the Oxford-Verney Junction-Bletchley-Bedford-Sandy-Old North Road route, but have some fuzzy memory of worrying whether I'd ever actually get there via Huntingdon: or was it getting back to Wolves or Salop or maybe even Gobowen??
Those system maps were a joy...
It must have been pre 5June59 when the line from Huntingdon East to St Ives closed: goodness knows what might happen to such young lads travelling alone on the railway today (or perhaps they'd enjoy it!)
Yes, indeed - my 1949 version of the railway map shows the Great Eastern line from Huntingdon to St. Ives which would have given a connection to Cambridge. However, Peterborough East was some 25 miles or so to the north on the line to March. So my guess is that the trip was either through P'boro East to Cambridge via March and Ely or St. Ives (but not Huntingdon); or it was off the Midland line from Kettering through their station at Huntingdon to Cambridge (but not via Peterborough).
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