Not West Bridgford No. 13

West Bridgford was relatively unusual in that for a place of its size and population it never possessed a railway station, although until after the legalised vandalism inflicted upon the nation by the infamous Dr Beeching the Midland main line passed right through the heart of the district. There was a minor halt some distance to the south at Edwalton, but the reasonable idea that there should be a station just five minutes’ walk from Central Avenue was never taken up. Passengers on the route from Nottingham Midland to London St Pancras via Melton Mowbray, Oakham, the Harringworth viaduct, Corby and the regular main line from Kettering southwards could enjoy a good view of the suburb, but never the convenience of local access.

For much of the route through West Bridgford the Midland Railway was carried on an embankment, with girder bridges across the Trent (now the Lady Bay road bridge), the Grantham Canal, Radcliffe Road (with a prominent Ferodo advertisement) and Bridgford Road, and brick arch bridges over Rectory Road, Melton Road and Devonshire Road (the only one of these arch bridges to survive to the present day, now carrying a footpath along the old trackbed) and a couple of minor bridges over footpaths in the vicinity of Stratford Road. Boundary Road and Melton Road, higher up, also had brick arch bridges which crossed over the railway line deep in its cutting through Edwalton hill.

The bridge over Bridgford Road, adjacent to Millicent Road and to the playing fields (now called Bridge Fields and used as an overspill car park for major cricketing events at Trent Bridge), was a skew girder span erected in the 1930s, replacing an earlier structure. Bridgford Road made a slight dip to allow the double-deckers on the No. 21 route to pass beneath this bridge, and there were lampposts there of reduced height. The bridge was demolished in 1980. The illustration, above, is Not Bridgford Road Bridge, but a rather similar one, with the same kind of extreme skew, situated in Eden Park (the subject of an earlier blog post in this series), south of Beckenham, in south-east London.