York Layerthorpe station in 1981

I once blogged about the Derwent Valley Railway (DVR):

When I was an undergraduate at York, the bus from the university into the city used to cross a bridge over an overgrown single-track railway. 

This was the Derwent Valley Light Railway, which in those days ran from Layerthorpe in the city for four miles out to Dunnington. When it opened in 1913 it had run almost to Selby: in 1981 it was to close altogether. 

One day I walked the line to Dunnington and back. Though it shows track that had long gone by then, the video above gives a good idea of the way the line looked in its final years. So decrepit was it that I was surprised when I met a very mixed freight train coming the other way.

That video has disappeared from YouTube, but I have found three photographs I took that day. I think it was in 1981, the last year of the DVR's operation.

This is the first, showing the line's York terminus at Layerthorpe. As with a lot of my shots from those days, there is too much empty foreground, and here the gents' loo receives undue prominence. Still it's nice to have found it.

The DVR was privately owned, but connected to the British Rail system via the Foss Islands Branch, which ran from a junction with the York to Scarborough line to Layerthorpe.

That branch too closed in 1988 when Rowntree's switched to using road transport.