Little bit of Cockfield station that survives 30 miles away - for now

Beneath the A19 Tees flyover in Stockton, about 30 miles from Cockfield, there is a footbridge which once allowed passengers to cross the Barnard Castle to Bishop Auckland line.

Now it crosses the Darlington to Saltburn line, although it doesn’t look as if any pedestrians use it – there are big, pointy metal fences preventing people from climbing its stairs and, at the top, its decking has been removed. Best not try it.

The Cockfield Fell station footbridge beneath the A19 flyover in Stockton. Picture: Richard Barber

“British Railways would always try to recycle equipment when it could, and when it was building the new marshalling yard at Thornaby, known as Tees Yard, it removed the bridge from Cockfield and put it to good use,” says Richard Barber who, in the mid-1970s, worked for Cleveland Bridge constructing the flyover which looks down on the footbridge.

The Tees Marshalling Yard was created from 1957 to hold wagons containing County Durham coal and Consett steel ready for the voracious industry of Middlesbrough or for export from the docks.

But running through the yard was the Darlington to Saltburn line, on its 1829 trackbed, and yard staff needed to be able to cross it without getting squashed. The redundant footbridge from Cockfield was pressed into service.

The reused Cockfield station footbridge newly in place in the Tees Marshalling Yard, with a diesel engine passing beneath it, in the 1960s. Picture: Rodney Wildsmith

However, the closure of the mines, the steelworks and the docks at the start of the 1980s meant that Tees Yard has been radically reduced in size – part of it is now the Maze Park Nature Reserve where the post-industrial “slag-based soil is ideal for plants that grow in limestone and chalk meadows”.

Now there is no need for anyone to cross the seaside line and so Cockfield’s Victorian footbridge is unused and looks forlorn and careworn. It faces a very uncertain future – unless it can be recycled for a second time to a third home.

• Memories 614 told the story of Cockfield Station, and the new North Eastern Railway Association booklet about the station’s operations between 1901 and 1911 is still available for free download from ner.org.uk

Nearly 40,000 passengers a year used the remote station in the first decade of the 20th Century when there were six trains in each direction calling at it. John Lambard, though, has an LNER timetable from 1938-39 which shows that nine trains in each direction stopped every weekday at Cockfield Fell with two extra trains on a Saturday to take shoppers to the market towns of Barney and Bishop.

READ MORE: EXCRUCIATING DEATH OF A COKE BURNER AT COCKFIELD

PUT the name “Kinninvie” into The Northern Echo’s archive and only pictures of crumpled cars are to be found. The last story we did on the hamlet was in 2020 when 850 people signed a petition demanding safety improvements following a crash when a Nissan Micra was smashed into a hedge by another vehicle.

This week, we’ve published striking pictures of the latest accident in which a white van crashed straight through a wall and ended up in a family’s dining room.

There’s not much to the four-house hamlet on the crossroads on a crest in the B6279 from Staindrop to Eggleston. The houses and outbuildings are painted white, denoting that they belong to the Raby estate, and the one other building is a stone mission church which had boarded up windows the last time Memories cycled through.

Oh, and there’s a bright red postbox.

And there’s a fascinating name.

Most dictionaries steer clear of trying to explain how Kinninvie came by its name, but we believe it is one very few – perhaps the only – Gaelic place name in County Durham. “Cinn” apparently means “headland” and “fioun” is “white”.

Its elevated position could qualify as a headland so perhaps there was a distinctive white rock in the fields around – or perhaps it is just known for its snowy weather.