Dearham Bridge railway station

Dearham Bridge was a railway station on the Maryport and Carlisle Railway (M&CR) serving the village and rural district of Dearham in Cumbria. The station was opened by the M&CR in 1842 as Dearham, but renamed Dearham Bridge in 1867 and lay in the Parish of Crosscanonby. Another station named Dearham existed on the M&CR's Derwent Branch.^[1]

History

Dearham Bridge station was opened by the Maryport & Carlisle Railway (M&CR) in 1840. At grouping in 1923 the M&CR became a part of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. It was one of several lightly-used intermediate stations on this route to be closed (in 1950) by the British Transport Commission in the years immediately after the nationalisation of the UK railway network. No trace of the station now remains, but the main Carlisle-Maryport line (completed in 1845) remains open and forms part of the Cumbrian Coast Line between Carlisle and Barrow in Furness. Branch lines here served Lowther Pit, Lonsdale Pit, Nelson Pit on Broughton Moor, Bertha Pit, etc.^[1]

The station is known for a haunting related to a man who threw his new-born child under a train here, killing the infant. Now, as a train is about to enter the tunnel, the child can occasionally be heard screaming before being hit. The father was hanged for the crime.^[2]

The Birkby Fire Brick Works and Colliery lay nearby, worked by Messrs. Steele and Beveridge, of Maryport; it gave employment to about forty people.^[3]

References

Notes

Further reading

• Jowett, Alan (March 1989). Jowett's Railway Atlas of Great Britain and Ireland: From Pre-Grouping to the Present Day (1st ed.). Sparkford: Patrick Stephens Ltd. ISBN 1-8526-0086-1. OCLC 22311137. 
• Jowett, Alan (2000). Jowett's Nationalised Railway Atlas (1st ed.). Penryn, Cornwall: Atlantic Transport Publishers. ISBN 0-9068-9999-0. OCLC 228266687.