Why Harry Potter’s train station at Goathland was no bridge too far for Humber engineers

With a span of around 66ft, the steel structure that carries steam trains across Eller Beck in the North York Moors is some way short of the 7,300ft expanse of the Humber Bridge.
The new brige at Goathland StationThe new brige at Goathland Station
The new brige at Goathland Station

But with the winds too high to maintain the miles of cables that span the estuary, some of its engineers have turned their hand to an artefact from an earlier era of engineering.

Bridge 27 at Goathland Station is almost as well-photographed as the one over the Humber. It was where Hagrid welcomed the young wizards off the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films, and it doubled as Aidensfield in Heartbeat on TV.

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It has also been the backdrop to a thousand tourist snapshots – but few of its visitors will have known that underneath it was rusting away.

The new brige at Goathland StationThe new brige at Goathland Station
The new brige at Goathland Station

The picturesque cast iron footbridge is perhaps the most recognisable landmark in Goathland, but it is the “underbridge” that holds it up which does the heavy lifting.

An unlovely piece of Edwardian ironwork, it is nevertheless essential to the continued running of one of the country’s most popular heritage railway lines – an attraction estimated to be worth £35m to the local tourist economy.

Three years ago, an appeal was launched to repair it, but expert analysis concluded that only a replacement would do, and yesterday, the engineers showed how they had done it.

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“It’s all on track, and with no heavy frost forecast it should stay that way,” said Nigel Trotter, a civil engineer who is head of infrastructure on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

“But the engineers are used to working in horrendous weather. At other times of year, the site manager would be dangling off the cables over the Humber.”

The bridge they are replacing, at a cost of around £1,250,000, dates from 1908, and has over its lifetime taken the weight of some of the heaviest engines built, including Flying Scotsman.

“It was corroded and badly worn,” Mr Trotter said. “We had to do something. If we hadn’t, we’d have had to restrict its use, and stop using the bigger engines.

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“We looked at various options to renew it or repair it, and we decided that repairing it would have too many unknowns. It’s like skeletons in the cupboard – once you start, you find more that needs doing, and it could have gone on for months.

“So the expert advice was to put in a new one.”

Having agreed the swap with the Heritage Lottery Fund, which put up half the money, the specialist firm of Cleveland Bridge, based in Darlington, was engaged to design, build and install a new 84-tonne structure to support the two train lines between Whitby and Pickering.

The firm’s downtime on its Humber Bridge contract coincided with the steam line’s closed season, Mr Trotter said. When the train service resumes at the beginning of April, the work will be finished.

The new bridge will match the traditional style of the old one as closely as possible, so as not to jar on the pictures of passing locomotives that can be taken from the hills above the little station.

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They took a shot when the old structure came out, and noticed how little the scenery had changed since 1908, when a photographer had captured it going in. The archive picture is in the archive of the National Railway Museum in York.

The new bridge had already been assembled for testing in a factory, before being dismantled again for its final rail journey to Goathland, avoiding the area’s notoriously narrow roads.

“We had a small hiccup one day when it rained very heavily,” Mr Trotter said. “But we’re on schedule now, and next week we’ll be concreting the deck.”