Rishworth branch
disused railway line in West Yorkshire, England
The Rishworth branch was built in the Ryburn valley by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and linked Sowerby Bridge with Rishworth and served the villages of Triangle, Ripponden, Barkisland and Rishworth.
History
A branch from Sowerby Bridge to Ripponden was authorised by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (Ripponden and Stainland Branches, &c.) Act 1865 (28 & 29 Vict. c. cccxxxii), with the extension to Rishworth authorised by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (Ripponden Branch Extension, &c.) Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict. c. lxxx). The line opened as far as Ripponden in 1878 and to Rishworth in 1881. The section to Ripponden was built by T. J. Walker at a cost of £113,000.
It was intended to extend the line to Littleborough to shorten the Calder Valley main line by 5 miles (8 km), but this was ruled out quite soon after the branch opened and never taken up again. The branch line was in competition for passengers firstly with a tram line that ran up the valley, and secondly after a private firm had started running buses between Rishworth and Halifax; this took away the remaining few passengers who used the service and the line was closed to passengers to Rishworth on 8 July 1929.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rishworth branch” as disused railway line in West Yorkshire, England. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as disused railway line in West Yorkshire, England. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7336092. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1865, 1870, 1878 and 1881.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rishworth branch” 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.