Lord Harborough's Curve at Pile Bridge

Image: © John Sutton Taken: 17 Jun 2010

This long-abandoned railway embankment 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 (behind the camera) 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. This spot is called Pile Bridge because the Curve crossed a lane and the River Eye here on a wooden pile bridge - long gone, leaving only the name to perplex future generations.

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