Ledston railway station

The line between Garforth and Castleford was opened by the North Eastern Railway (NER) on 12 August 1878. The two intermediate stations on the line (Kippax and Ledstone) opened to passenger traffic at the same time (though goods had started in April 1878).^[1]

The station was equipped with only one platform on the eastern side of the line (Kippax having the same arrangement).^[2] The station was noted in the original NER architects drawings as being Allerton Bywater, but the NER had a common practice of not repeating station names across its network; they already had an Allerton station on the Harrogate to York line.^[3] So it is believed that the station took its name from nearby Ledstone Hall, an estate a 1-mile (1.6 km) to the north-east.^[2] Even so, in 1915, the spelling was changed again to Ledston.^[4]

The station was laid out with a single track at the one platform; the entire line was without a passing loop. Services in 1914 were usually six trains each way, four of which ran through to Pontefract. By 1949, this had been curtailed to just three services a day which all terminated and started at Castleford.^[5]

The station, and indeed the line, served a sparse population and so in 1951, just three years after nationalisation, the station was closed to passengers. Goods traffic continued in the station sidings until September 1963^[6] and the line remained open through the station for freight trains to the adjacent Allerton Bywater colliery. Passenger excursion trains still used the station until the mid-1960s and advertised passenger trains were also diverted over the line and through Ledston when necessary.^[7] The station buildings were still in situ in 1983 and the signal box was not demolished until 1988.^[8] The station has since been demolished and a housing development now covers the site.

• Joy, David (1984). A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Volume 8; South and West Yorkshire (2 ed.). Newton Abbot: David & Charles. ISBN 0-946537-11-9.
• Young, Alan (2015). Lost Stations of Yorkshire; the West Riding. Kettering: Silver Link. ISBN 978-1-85794-438-9.

• Location of the station on a 1947 navigable map