Tower and Town, June 2019 (view the full edition)Goods (Freight Trains) To MarlboroughIt is easy to forget that the early railways were built to carry freight not passengers. When the Liverpool and Manchester - the first intercity railway - was built it was primarily to carry goods (and especially raw and finished cotton); the huge demand for passenger travel came as a surprise to the promoters. And so it was with the railways right until the 1950s and 1960s. Almost everything was moved by rail - more urgent and smaller items by passenger train and bulkier ones by goods train. Marlborough College boys would mostly arrive by train and the coal for heating and cooking in the same way in the college's own railway wagon. (It probably had only one, despite the 64 painted on the side!). As so much came and went by train - coal for the town's gasworks, livestock, much of the stock for the town's shops - the old Marlborough High Level station became a goods depot, and the low level station had a big goods area of its own. To manage the goods trains, breaking up arriving trains and reassembling the wagons into new departing trains huge marshalling yards were needed, and these viewed from space are the most visible bits of railway engineering rather than the stations or the tracks. However many were of these were built in the 1960s just as the days of individual freight wagons came to an end, so they quickly closed.  Alexander Kirk-Wilson |