Robin Longbottom on how a viaduct, now largely forgotten, was once a prominent feature of the Worth Valley railway line

VALE Mill Lane at Lees, near Haworth, links the village to Oakworth Station.

It is very narrow and there are three right-angle bends along the route. The most awkward of these bends is known as Hoot Corner because on the approach the word HOOT has been painted on a stone wall in large letters. Whilst the warning to hoot before negotiating the bend is well known locally, what is less well known is that it is painted on the lower part of a former stone pier that once supported a railway viaduct.

Now largely forgotten, Oakworth Viaduct originally spanned a large mill dam at Vale Mill and the River Worth. It was built in 1866 and was a spectacular feature along the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. Unlike most viaducts it was not constructed in a series of stone arches but was made of timber and supported on 29 stone piers rising some 30 feet above ground level. The viaduct took the form of a slow bend that enabled the railway line to negotiate its way around Mytholmes Hill, between Oakworth Station and Ebor Lane, Haworth.

Within 20 years of its construction, the timber structure had begun to deteriorate and the speed at which trains crossed had been much reduced. It is said that passengers to Haworth became so alarmed at the prospect of travelling across it that many preferred to get off the train at Oakworth and walk. No doubt the Tay Bridge disaster in Scotland in 1879, when an entire train plunged into the River Tay, did little to allay local fears of a similar calamity.

A serious accident did occur in 1891, although passengers were not involved. On November 24 a goods train was on its way from Oxenhope to Keighley. As it slowed down to pass over the viaduct, the driver, James Jennings, left the cab of the tank engine to oil a valve. As he made his way along the narrow footplate at the side of boiler, he lost his balance and fell from the engine as it crossed the viaduct. The fall of some 30 feet killed him instantly. An inquest held the following day at the Queen’s Hotel in Keighley returned a verdict of death by misadventure.

At the time of the accident the Midland Railway Company already had plans to divert the line and do away with the viaduct. Some work had already started, and the proposal was to put a cutting through Mytholmes Hill and join the existing line just below Ebor Lane. To achieve the diversion a corner of the dam at Vale Mill had to be filled in to facilitate a section of new embankment. The River Worth also had to be crossed twice. The first river crossing was by a single-span iron bridge and the second by a three-arched stone bridge. The second bridge also crossed a small beck from mills in Providence Lane, Oakworth, and the tail goit from a water wheel at Mytholmes Mill.

The work was undertaken by Messrs Whitaker & Company, quarrymen and civil engineers of Horsforth, near Leeds. They soon hit a problem at Mytholmes Hill when a cutting proved to be impracticable, and therefore a decision was made to replace it with a tunnel. The tunnel was 75 yards long and blasted through a hard bed of millstone grit with explosives. Debris from the tunnel was eventually used to fill in the old railway cutting below Mytholmes Hill.

The new section of line was about half a mile long and was said to have cost £25,000. It opened to rail traffic in November 1892 and the old viaduct was subsequently demolished.