Railway accommodation bridge BIF/9 in Auckland Castle Park

This is a railway accommodation bridge, built in 1885 as part of the Spennymoor Branch of the North Eastern Railway Company. The bridge is constructed primarily from snecked sandstone, with most of the stone rock-faced and having smooth margins, and features a red brick barrel arch.

The bridge is a single-span structure with abutments and embanked approaches that include retaining walls. The semi-circular, horse-shoe arch is approximately 4.8 metres wide with a span of 4.5 metres, rising to a crown height of 7.88 metres above ground level. The arch rings rise from impost bands of large, stepped voussoirs with stepped ends, which fit directly into the spandrels. A horizontal string course sits at deck level, separating the spandrels from the parapets. These impost bands and the string course share the rock-faced and margined masonry style used elsewhere on the bridge. The parapets end at emphasised end piers that project slightly forward from the parapets, with their caps also rising slightly higher than the intervening coping. The end piers are constructed from large rectangular blocks, rock-faced and margined on the external faces, but simply tooled and margined on the inner faces. The coping stones on the eastern parapet and the caps on all four piers are rock-faced on their internal faces, matching the parapet walls, whereas the coping stones on the western parapet are fully tooled with lightly chamfered edges, suggesting they are replacements. All coping stones slope slightly towards their external elevations. The public-fronting faces of the four caps and the eastern parapet coping include a smooth, concave moulding followed by a rectangular moulding. On the caps, the rectangular moulding rises to a low relief pyramid, with the intersections between the pyramid’s faces forming a saltire when viewed from above. Thinner versions of these caps are present on the retaining walls of the embankments. The embankment retaining walls slope outwards towards their base, curve down towards the end piers, and have coping stones similar in style to those on the eastern parapet but entirely rock-faced and margined. Some coping stones are missing or dislodged.