The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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LNER Manufacture of Switches and Crossings
Despite the thousands of railway films, there must be few that show the detailed construction of sections of railway track inside a workshop just after the last war, as seen here.
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Overview
This is a film of a railway workshop of the London and North Eastern Railway where a rail crossover is being constructed, possibly made just prior to railway nationalisation in 1948.
It isn’t known who made this film, or where, or exactly what year it is. The London and North Eastern Railway was the second largest of the "Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921, but the workshop is most probably in Yorkshire or the North East. The section of track being constructed is marked with “Low Fell”, which is near to Gateshead and part of the East Coast Main Line. There was a large maintenance backlog as a result of the war.
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