South Yard
Connecting York to Britain
Goods sidings, York, 1952. Science Museum Group.
Looking out ahead of us, facing away from Station Hall, we are confronted by a vast web of interconnected railway lines. Joining us from all corners of the country, the tracks weave in and out of one another with a complex pattern indicative of the journey they took to get here.
And what a journey it must have been. In the near-one hundred years between 1877 and 1972, millions of tonnes of freight moved up and down these lines to and from the building behind us, York’s former goods station. If we had been here at any point during that period, we would be ducking, dodging and diving out of the way as workers hurry to keep their consignments moving in and out of the city.
Can you hear the trains pulling towards the goods station? Horns blare, whistles whirr and steam shoots skywards as wagons filled with everything from eggs to elephants are hauled exhaustively behind. Around us, slow-moving freight produces a clattering of buffers while staff, acting as gatekeepers to the city, check everything upon arrival and ensure it is in order to proceed.
It’s in this way that the goods yard acted as the central point of a vast rail network that sustained both the regional and national economy. A beating heart that allowed, for the first time, Britain’s diverse industries to offer their goods to everybody in the country no matter where they were based.