Methley Joint Railway
UK railway line
The Methley Joint Railway (or Methley joint line) was a short English railway line constructed by the Bradford, Wakefield and Leeds Railway company, connecting its Leeds direction line with other companies' eastward routes to York, the north-east, and Goole. The line connected collieries along its route. The BW&LR changed its name to the West Yorkshire Railway at the same time. The line was double track, just over five miles in length, between junctions at Lofthouse and Methley.
The connected Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and the North Eastern Railway were brought in to joint ownership of the line in 1864, and the line opened in 1865; passenger traffic was delayed, starting in 1869.
A variety of passenger train services operated over the route, but the line closed to passenger trains in 1964, and completely in 1981.
Origin
The Bradford, Wakefield and Leeds Railway had opened in 1857, forming a link between Wakefield and Leeds. It was worked by the Great Northern Railway, and gave that company a much improved access to Leeds.
Although worked by the GNR, the company took the initiative in seeking extensions to its network, and in the 1863 session of Parliament the BW&LR sought powers for a branch from Lofthouse to Methley and another to Low Moor, and to change its name to the West Yorkshire Railway. The Lofthouse to Methley branch and change of title were sanctioned by the West Yorkshire Railway Act 1863 (26 & 27 Vict.
“Methley Joint Railway” enters the record as uK railway line. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Methley, Joint and Railway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q30688188. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864, 1865, 1869 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Methley Joint 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.