A PIECE of Darlington’s railway history is going to get a lick of paint within the next fortnight.
It is the clock which now hangs on the wall of Morrisons on North Road. Beneath the clock, thousands of railwaymen used to walk to work in the locomotive workshops which once occupied the supermarket site.
Five trolleybuses in North Road outside the railway works with the Morrisons clock clearly visible over the entrance
The clock was installed over the entrance to the works in 1894. The North Eastern Railway provided the drum for the clock, and the mechanism itself was made by William Potts & Sons, of Leeds.
An Edwardian postcard showing the railway workshops, and the clock which hangs just about in the same place today
William Potts, the founder of the clock company, was a Darlingtonian, born in Salt Yard in Bondgate. In 1903, after his death, the company gave the town the Potts Memorial Clock to go in the lodge in South Park.
READ MORE: THE STORY OF WILLIAM POTTS, THE GREAT CLOCKMAN OF DARLINGTON
It is one of 10 Potts clocks in the town. In fact, practically every church, railway station and town hall in County Durham and North Yorkshire has a Potts clock in it.
In their heyday, the locomotive works employed 4,000 people. The works closed in 1966, following the Beeching Axe, and North Road fell derelict – there is a story that briefly there was a speedboat-building businesses established in a workshop and Roger Moore came to inspect a boat that was being built to his specifications.
A police incident beneath the clock, now on the wall of the supermarket, in 2013
When Morrisons opened in 1980, we believe that part of its planning permission required the re-erection of the clock on the supermarket wall in the same place as it had once hung over the works entrance.
Darlington MP Peter Gibson has drawn the weathered state of the clock to the attention of Morrisons’ headquarters and their maintenance team has promised to tend to it within the next fortnight.
Mr Gibson said: “With £35m of investment in our flagship Rail Heritage Quarter at the station, the preservation and improvement of the area around North Road is hugely important and improvements to this historic clock will complement the work already being undertaken to showcase Darlington’s rich railway heritage.”
READ MORE: ON THE TRACKS OF 100 YEARS: LNER CELEBRATES ITS CENTENARY
AND MORE: £250,000 FOR HISTORIC DARLINGTON RAILWAY BUILDING WITH THE WONKY CLOCK
A shift ends beneath the North Road clock at the railway shops in the early 1960s
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