Lord Harborough's Curve from Pile Bridge

Image: © John Sutton Taken: 17 Jun 2010

The long-abandoned and overgrown railway embankment which crosses this picture is one with an interesting and sensational history. In the 1840s Lord Harborough did all he could to prevent the building of the Midland Railway line from Leicester (Syston) to Peterborough. Lord Harborough’s men and the Midland’s surveyors engaged in fisticuffs, the surveyors were locked up and then released on the advice of the local policeman, and in further confrontations both the peer and the railway company employed ruffians to fight their corners. Eventually a compromise was reached, and Lord Harborough’s Curve – a deviation whose tightness was later to prove a handicap to high-speed running of the Midland’s Nottingham-Kettering-St Pancras expresses – was opened in 1848 to take the line east of Saxby without damaging Lord Harborough’s view too much. The next Lord Harborough was better disposed towards railways, and Lord Harborough’s Curve was replaced by the present, more generous curve, to the south, in 1892, when the Saxby & Bourne Railway – the most westerly part of the Midland & Great Northern route from the East Midlands to the Norfolk coast – was also built. The estate farmhouse takes its name, Pile Bridge, from the wooden-pile bridge which carried Lord Harborough's Curve over the lane on which I stood to take the picture. Only the name remains, to perplex future generations.

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