Rockingham (South Yorkshire) railway station is the terminus of the preserved line which is being built along the trackbed of the former Elsecar branch of the

South Yorkshire Railway The South Yorkshire Railway was a railway company with lines in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Initially promoted as the South Yorkshire Coal Railway in 1845, the railway was enabled by an act of 1847 as the South Yorkshire Doncaster and ...

. The station is built within the

Elsecar Heritage Centre Elsecar Heritage Centre is a visitor attraction centre in Elsecar, Barnsley, England. Operated by Barnsley Museums, it has independent shops, studios, galleries, cafes and a large antiques centre in former Victorian engineering workshops. A vis ...

, the former National Coal Board workshops at

Elsecar Elsecar (, ) is a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England. It is near the villages of Jump and Wentworth and south of the town of Hoyland, south of Barnsley and north-east of Sheffield. Elsecar falls withi ...

. The station officially opened to passengers on 5 April 1996, when the inaugural train ran to Hemingfield. The line runs from Rockingham station to Hemingfield Basin, alongside the Elsecar Branch of the

Dearne and Dove Canal The Dearne and Dove Canal ran for almost ten miles through South Yorkshire, England from Swinton to Barnsley through nineteen locks, rising . The canal also had two short branches, the Worsbrough branch and the Elsecar branch, both about two ...

but it was intended to extend the line to

Cortonwood Cortonwood was a colliery near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. The colliery's proposed closure was a tipping point in the 1984-85 miners' strike. The site is now a shopping and leisure centre. History Cortonwood colliery was sunk in 1873 ...

with halts at Hemingfield and Cortonwood during 2013. However, by February 2017 the project was ongoing but still incomplete. The station was called Rockingham by Barnsley Council (who re-opened the railway) after a second name of the Earl Fitzwilliam family, the original builders of the line in the 1850s.

See also

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Further reading