The trek ‘n’ trace that I did Friday 29 April 2016 included a section of the (long dismantled) Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR), including the sole tunnel still available to view. I love steam trains, tunnels & hidden places, so this diary entry will be about the NSR in St Anns.

I use Mapillary to store photos taken whilst tracking. At first, the only way that I could display them in this diary was via my personal site. However, Mapillary support (support at mapillary.com) pointed out the Download sub-menu, and that allows a photo to be shown here.

On Carlton Road, a little east of the junction with Porchester Road, on the south side of the road, is a blue-brick wall that is actually the top of the NSR Bridge which previously carried Carlton Road over the NSR Railway line between the station at the north side & the track to Sneinton tunnel at the south side.

You may notice that this is a Blue Brick bridge. Those are highest quality Engineering brick (made in Staffordshire from Etruria marl) and the reason that so many of the NSR houses, walls & bridges continue to exist & function since they were originally built in 1889. It also means that the NSR was phenomenally expensive to create. (A personal story:- when I was living in Hull I obtained some Yellow brick – Engineering brick which is one step down from the Blue – to line the inside of a chimney; it was almost impossible to drill or cut, and impervious to water).

At the right-hand side of the Carlton Road Bridge/wall is a gate, and on the right-hand side of that gate is entry for folks on foot.

The path beyond leads down the cutting (20 foot, which is 7 or 8 metres high)…

…and has the Sneinton tunnel entrance at the end. There is a locked gate that leads into the tunnel. I haven’t been inside, but I understand that a Rifle Club uses the tunnel (entry by application).

The path continues beyond the tunnel entrance with a grassed-area above the tunnel.

One interesting oddity lies just beyond that grassed area: a 9m high railway tunnel chimney (another chimney for a different tunnel in Mapperley has been filled solid by vandals with waste, so a 9m high metal pipe makes good sense).

My Friday tracking began with that huge metal pipe. Let’s now skip to Porchester Road (formerly known as Thorneywood Lane) and the Thorneywood Station. 1 Porchester Road – the former Station House – is the sole remnant of that station except for the retaining wall of the Goods Yard, though lots & lots of remnants & tunnels are hidden behind earth walls.

The Station House housed the StationMaster in 1889 and was positioned above the station. Today Parry Court occupies what used to be the site of the station (on the north side of Carlton-Road bridge, although the current ground-level is at least 10’ (3m) above the 1889 ground-level), then Len Maynard Court. The next set of houses to the north is Porters Walk / Paddington Mews. That is positioned above the site of a very busy Goods Yard.

The Station House is also made of Blue Brick, and another Blue-Brick wall runs down from the far side of the former Pub (Coopers Arms, 3 Porchester Road)…

…running north to what was a 30 foot/9m tall retaining wall for the Goods Yard.

Another tunnel ran from between the Station House & Coopers Arms under Porchester Road then (as best as I can tell) the track ran up Burgass Road to the Brickyard at it’s end. The tunnel on the west side has been effectively hidden by part-filling in the cutting that contained the station; I haven’t yet surveyed the east side.

All that remains of the 30 foot retaining wall is a 6 foot high wall.

However, if you compare the photos at disused-stations.org.uk it quickly becomes obvious that the rest of the wall is still there, but below the ground. Indeed, if you snoop around it also becomes clear that the end of the goods yard exists within it’s cutting, north of the end houses in Paddington Mews, with the entrance to the Thorneywood Tunnel at it’s end. However, on the occasions that I scouted it out it was raining, with a 10 foot (3m) sheer drop to the floor and, most likely, with the tunnel entrance hidden below the soil floor. I declined to explore that section further.

Thorneywood Tunnel travels below (would you believe it) Thorneywood & emerges just beyond Permain Park.

The park is built directly above the tunnel but, in this case, sadly, only a wall of earth & trees is for show where the tunnel entrance should be.

The track of the tracks is still there to walk but, frankly, not worth the effort.

Beyond the modern Mickleborough Avenue the tracks travelled across a high-level bridge to a station in St Anns. One of the bridge pillars was built next to, and directly responsible for the final destruction of, the remains of the medieval St Anns Well (an actual well and holy site visited by Kings in medieval times, the waters of which still travel in a culvert under The Wells Road & St Anns Well Road), and which ended up in the car-park of The Gardeners Public House (English drinking establishment) which latter has now itself also been erased. Honestly, the amount of interesting history that Nottingham has just thrown away is beyond belief.

Above is all that remains: yet another blue-brick wall, whilst the developers wait for an archaeological dig to be completed.