The record, 1848 to 1963

Every other entry in this book hangs on a spine of dates. This is that spine: the works as its own paperwork recorded it, from the day the railway booked it on to the day it booked the works off.

1848: booked on

The Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway had outgrown its wooden shops at Newton, seven miles from Manchester. Its locomotive man, Richard Peacock, chose a flat field at Openshaw beside the running line and the Ashton canal, and the new works was building engines there by the end of the decade. The choice is visible on the map that recorded the ground first: open land, water for the boilers, and room to grow, entered before the works had a name anyone remembers.

1847 and 1897: the name changes

The railway renamed itself before the works learned to keep up. The Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester became the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway in 1847, and the MS&LR renamed itself the Great Central Railway in 1897 to match its ambition: the London Extension, opened in 1899, the last main line built into the capital in the steam age. The works' output grew with the name: Directors for the expresses, 8K goods engines for the freight, 9N tanks for the suburbs.

1923: grouped

The Grouping folded the Great Central into the London and North Eastern Railway, the second largest of the Big Four. The works kept its bays and its men and gained a bigger company's order book: more A5 tanks went down the erecting shop in the 1920s, and the repair book thickened as the LNER sent its eastern engines to Openshaw for overhaul.

1948: nationalised

British Railways took over in 1948 and the ownership line changed again while the men stayed put. Under BR the balance of the book tipped decisively: new construction concentrated at fewer works, and Gorton's bays filled with engines in for repair rather than engines being born. The depot beside it, coded 9G, kept watering and coaling the traffic while the works kept it repairable.

1963: booked off

The closure came in 1963, after a decade in which the run-down was visible to anyone reading the book: fewer engines erected, more of the system dieselised, the work thinning. The loco shed outlived the works by two years, closing in 1965. What four owners had kept for a hundred and fifteen years, one decision ended.

The names over the gate

The works' ownership entries are worth a page of their own, because each change of name meant a change of master without a change of men. The MS&LR name lasted fifty years; the Great Central name twenty six; the LNER name twenty five; the British Railways name fifteen and the last. Each repainting of the gate told the men inside which company's order book would feed them, and each time the shops answered with the same product: engines built the way the Tank built them. The record reads like four companies in a hundred and fifteen years; the roll call reads like one workforce.

The entry, checked

Every date here is taken from the published record rather than memory, because the spine must hold before the entries hang on it. The sources are listed below; the works' own map and plan survive where the collections kept them.