Stanford Viaduct is a

railway viaduct A viaduct is a specific type of bridge that consists of a series of arches, piers or columns supporting a long elevated railway or road. Typically a viaduct connects two points of roughly equal elevation, allowing direct overpass across a wide va ...

Leicestershire Leicestershire ( ; postal abbreviation Leics.) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East Midlands, England. The county borders Nottinghamshire to the north, Lincolnshire to the north-east, Rutland to the east, Northamptonshire t ...

and Nottinghamshire. It is named after the nearby village of Stanford on Soar. Built as part of the Great Central Railway's London Extension opened in 1899, it carried the

Great Central Main Line The Great Central Main Line (GCML), also known as the London Extension of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR), is a former railway line in the United Kingdom. The line was opened in 1899 and built by the Great Central Railw ...

over the

River Soar The River Soar () is a major tributary of the River Trent in the English East Midlands and is the principal river of Leicestershire. The source of the river is midway between Hinckley and Lutterworth. The river then flows north through Leicest ...

and a road (Meadow Lane). It was built out of blue brick by the contractor, Henry Lovatt of Wolverhampton. The three central arches are

skewed In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean. The skewness value can be positive, zero, negative, or undefined. For a unimoda ...

to allow the Soar to pass underneath. When the rest of the GCML was closed in the 1960s, the section from Loughborough South Junction was kept open as a branch of the Midland Main Line to the

British Gypsum BPB Ltd (formerly BPB plc) (British Plaster Board) was a British building materials business. It once was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. In 2005, the company was purchased by Saint-Gobain of France. The company subsidiary British Gypsum, ...

works at East Leake. Currently, the viaduct is not used by gypsum trains, or the heritage trains of the Nottingham Heritage Railway.Great Central Railway Nottingham
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References

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External links

Stanford Viaduct in background of photo
Railway viaducts in Leicestershire Railway viaducts in Nottinghamshire Skew bridges Great Central Railway (preserved)