Leeds–Northallerton railway
UK railway line
The Leeds–Northallerton railway is a partly disused railway line between West and North Yorkshire, in northern England.
History
The line was opened by the Leeds Northern Railway, in the 1850s.
The Leeds and Thirsk Railway via Starbeck opened on 9 July 1848.
In 1852 as the Leeds Northern Railway the extension to Northallerton and Stockton opened.
The line then became part of the North Eastern Railway in the 1854 amalgamation.
All three stations at Leeds (Central, Wellington and New) were used at various times.
The section between Leeds and Harrogate is still extant, but its trains now serve a former branch line to York instead of continuing through Ripon to Northallerton.
The line north of Harrogate was closed a few years after the publication of Richard Beeching's The Reshaping of British Railways report. The route was closed to passenger traffic on 6 March 1967, but a limited number of freight trains used the line to Ripon until 1969. It was supposed that closing this stretch of line would have little impact, since passengers travelling north could join the East Coast Main Line at York.
The public source identifies “Leeds–Northallerton railway” as uK railway line. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Leeds, Northallerton and railway.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6515813. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1848, 1852, 1854 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leeds–Northallerton railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.