Archive Issue 122

from Waterways to Manchester This view from the head of the ferry landing alongside Waterloo Road in Runcorn, close to All Saints Church (behind the camera) shows detail of the Transporter Bridge and its surroundings well. In the right foreground the ferry slip leads down to the waters of the Manchester Ship Canal. Once the canal wall between the new navigation and the Mersey estuary (hidden beyond the wall) was built ferry crossings became a more tiresome and unattractive proposition as described above. The detour to use the high level path alongside the L&NWR over the railway bridge became more attractive and pressure increased for a road crossing of the Mersey. The Transporter Bridge quickly became a useful and popular symbol of local pride. In this photograph the car was captured approaching the ‘dock’ at the Runcorn side. The operator can be seen silhouetted in his pagoda cabin above the road deck as he uses his tramcar-style controller to reduce the speed of the winch, on the Widnes Bank, and bring the car gently against the end of Waterloo Road. The narrow footway between the girders that gave access for maintenance was accessed from the spiral staircase seen here within the Runcorn Tower; there was a similar stairway at Widnes. St Mary’s school on the skyline in Widnes West Bank, opened in about 1873, survives as Widnes Academy. It is now uncomfortably crowded by the approach flyover to the Runcorn-Widnes road bridge, sometimes known as the Jubilee Bridge, that replaced the Transporter Bridge in the 1960s. John Ryan collection

From: A Possible Game Changer? The prototype Transporter for loading and unloading railway containers was built by Greenwood & Batley of Leeds and placed upon a Thornycroft chassis. The device was demonstrated to the LM&SR in April 1929 at King’s Cross but the idea does not appear to have been taken up. Thorneycroft Collection, Hampshire Cultural Trust