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End of the line for Thornaby

IT doesn’t seem that long ago that railway enthusiasts could undertake visits to any number of huge diesel traction depots. One by one, those famous installations have been closed down and many have now been wiped off the face of the earth.

Among those bulldozed in relatively recent times are Tinsley, Stratford, Gateshead, Eastfield, March, Bristol Bath Road and Old Oak Common. To that grisly litany can now be added one of the largest and most important of them all, Thornaby, which has been razed to the ground some four years after it closed.

Situated a few miles west of the main line from Eaglescliffe to Middlesbrough and next to the once sprawling Tees marshalling yard, Thornaby featured the last roundhouse built by British Railways. It opened in June 1958 and replaced a number of local steam sheds at Stockton, Haverton Hill and Middlesbrough.

Octagonal in shape, it boasted 22 roads around a 70ft electric turntable and was used for stabling diesel locos once the depot had closed to steam in the 1960s.

Even though the structure was demolished in 1988, its footprint remained very much visible and could be seen from the air via Google Earth maps.

The depot was coded 51L by BR but in the 1970s became TE under the TOPS system and later, under BR sectorisation, gained a ‘kingfisher’ as its logo (see image).

The main shed next to the roundhouse was of typical period construction and had 11 roads for the main line diesels plus two shorter roads for maintenance of the many shunters that worked the adjacent freight yard and other locations. The site also contained offices, stores and mess rooms for staff (see photo on pp4/5).

In the early 1960s, Teesside was very much an industrial haven in the North East, refining oil and producing thousands of tons of steel and chemical products. Britain then was still one of the key heavy industry centres of the world and trains were used to move many of the products on Teesside.

In its early modern traction days, the depot was home to BR Sulzer Type 2s and a batch of BRCW Type 2s, but in 1962 it received its first allocation of a design that was to become synonymous with Thornaby – English Electric Type 3s (Class 37s).
Among the other types of diesel locos based there over the years were Classes 08, 17, 20, 25, 27, 31, 40, 47, 56 and latterly Class 60s and 66s. Wagon maintenance or repairs, and even a small amount of DMU work, was carried out too.

Like all BR’s freight depots, it became part of the English Welsh & Scottish Railway empire upon Privatisation in 1996 and EWS’s subsequent order for 250 Class 66s from General Motors meant that changes would inevitably happen. The new locos sported better electronics with diagnostics and were more reliable, needing far less servicing.

EWS’s decision to centre maintenance on Toton depot, Notts, coupled with the withdrawal of older locos that were more costly to run, meant that the days of big, busy traction maintenance depots were numbered.

The end came in late 2007 when Thornaby closed, although the building was used by EWS and latterly DB Schenker as a store for withdrawn locos that were being sold for scrap.

It was only a matter of time before  demolition of the 53-year-old depot began. Contractors moved onto the site in May and by the end of June most of the buildings had been obliterated.

Another famous name gone, with only memories and photos to recall its heyday.