Waltham Iron Ore Tramway
industrial tramway in Leicestershire
The Waltham Iron Ore Tramway was a 1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in) gauge industrial tramway serving the ironstone pits of the Waltham Iron Ore Company, a subsidiary of the Staveley Coal and Iron Company. It was located to the north of the village of Branston in Leicestershire on the edge of the Belvoir Estate. The tramway operated from 1884 until 1958.
History
The Waltham Iron Ore Company was formed in 1882 to work ironstone from fields near the village of Waltham on the Wolds. It was a subsidiary of the Staveley Coal and Iron Company. The company worked these fields for less than two years, before the deposits were exhausted. They then leased further fields near the village of Branston and began extracting ore there, starting in either 1884 or 1885.
The first pits worked were Green Lane and Long Hole. These were served by a network of metre gauge tramways which were moved as the working faces progressed. They connected to the northern terminus of the Great Northern Railway's Eaton Branch Railway, which tipplers allowed unloading of the narrow gauge ore wagons into standard gauge trucks.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waltham Iron Ore Tramway” 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.