Railway accommodation bridge BIF/9 in Auckland Castle Park

Railway accommodation bridge, 1885 for the Spennymoor Branch of the North Eastern Railway Company.

MATERIALS: snecked sandstone, for the most part rock-faced with smooth margins; a red brick arch barrel.

PLAN: a single-span bridge with abutments and embanked approaches with retaining walls.

DESCRIPTION: not inspected, information from other sources. The bridge comprises a high semi-circular, horse-shoe arch about 4.8m wide by 4.5m span with the crown rising to 7.88m above ground level. The rings of the arch rise from impost bands of large stepped voussoirs with stepped ends that key directly in to the spandrels. A horizontal string course at deck level separates the spandrels from the parapets. Impost bands and string coursing are rockfaced and margined in keeping with the masonry elsewhere, but rise from a smooth, concave lower moulding. The parapets terminate in end piers, emphasised by breaking forward from the parapets slightly (their caps also rise marginally higher than the intervening coping), all formed of large rectangular blocks again rock-faced and margined except for the inner (non-public-fronting) faces which are simply tooled and margined. The coping stones to the eastern parapet and caps to all four piers are rockfaced apart from their internal faces (tooled to match the parapet walls), but the coping stones to the western parapet are tooled in their entirety with lightly chamfered edges, suggesting they are secondary. The tops of all coping stones slope down slightly towards the external elevations, presumably to shed water. The public-fronting faces of the four caps plus the eastern parapet coping consist of two stages: a first-stage, smooth, concave moulding (as per the impost bands and string coursing) succeeded by a rectangular moulding. On the caps this second stage rises to a low relief pyramid, with the intersections between the faces of each pyramid picked out by broad channelling so as to form the shape of a saltire when viewed from above. Identical but thinner caps occur on the end piers to the embankment retaining walls, which break both forward and back from the adjacent walling. The walls themselves slope out slightly towards their base, curve down towards the end piers and have coping very similar to that on the eastern parapet, but rock-faced and margined on all surfaces and, like the caps on the adjoining piers, of a much thinner profile. Some of the coping stones are dislodged and/or missing.