Austhorpe Lane Bridge, HUL4/21

Austhorpe Lane Bridge is a railway basket arch overbridge built around 1830-34 by James Walker of Walker & Burges for the Leeds & Selby Railway.

The bridge is constructed from sandstone ashlar and Bramley Fall gritstone. It features a single span that carries a road over the railway, designed to accommodate four tracks. This bridge is part of a series of bridges along the Leeds & Selby Railway that share a similar design.

The structure is made of squared, coursed, and tooled stone blocks. The basket arch, made of Bramley Fall gritstone, has stepped, tooled, and inscribed v-jointed voussoirs that spring from a wide, horizontally-tooled impost band. The arch soffit consists of large stone blocks. The outer walls of the abutments and wing walls are constructed from long, narrow blocks of tooled, v-jointed sandstone ashlar, which have weathered over time. The inner abutment walls are heavily tooled with v-joints. The parapets are made of larger blocks of Bramley Fall gritstone with pronounced horizontal tooling and end in characteristic oval piers. They rest on square-cut, tooled, and inscribed string courses and feature asymmetrically-curved coping with horizontal tooling.

It is important to note that the west face of the bridge is obscured by a separate concrete and steel footbridge built in 1961, which is not of special interest and is excluded from the listing.