Every Level Crossing In The UK

If, like me, you’re a fan of the London Underground, then there’s a good chance that you’re aware of Geoff Marshall. He creates videos on Youtube, for both his own channel, and also the Londonist channel, mainly about the London Underground and other London railway stuff, but also on other subjects. You should probably check them out.

Anyway, he did a video recently about Emerson Park Station – the least-used station on the London Overground. During the video, he tried to find out how many of the pedestrian railway crossings to the south-east of the station were level crossings (ie. you have to actually walk over the tracks).

Now, this reminded me that a few years back I was trying to find out if there were any pedestrian level crossings in Manchester (where I live) for a photography project. Although I ended up not getting around to doing the project, I did manage to download a file from the Network Rail website which contained data about every railway level crossing in the UK.

In order to make the data easier to browse, I converted it to a Google Earth file. The crossings are organised by type, so I could just select the pedestrian ones.

It turns out that – yay! – there are three pedestrian level crossings inside the M60!

Anyway. So that was a thing that happened. And then I forgot about it.

So when I watched Geoff’s video it occurred to me that the Google Earth file I created might be of interest to other people. So, um, here it is.

Sadly, Network Rail have removed the crossing data off their website, so not only is the information in the Google Earth file about four years out of date, but when you click on “details” for a crossing it now returns a 404 “File Not Found” error, rather than giving you information about the crossing. I will probably clean it up at some point.

Or maybe I won’t. Who knows?