ON April 17, I reported that a reader in Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland, Mr Jim Cooper, had written to say that during the war years he was a railway fireman at Bolton's Crescent Road loco shed, and he thought he remembered the Bolton/Bury/Manchester canal being breached, diverting trains between Bolton and Manchester for several days.

This followed a story of a similar happening in 1936.

Well, I had never heard of this second breach, and asked if any reader knew anything about it.

I have now had a letter from Mr Tom Wolstencroft, of Highfield Street, Kearsley, who has been doing a bit of delving into old papers at Farnworth Library.

"I do not know of a canal breach during the second world war, but there was a landslide of the railway embankment in Kearsley that must have had the same disruptive effect.," he writes.

"The slide occurred on the Manchester-bound side of the line, about 100 yards or so on the Manchester side of the tunnel which carries the lower end of Slackey Brow under the railway. As I recall, the amount of displaced earth was quite extensive, and it was said that a slippage and resulting sideways pressure of the large amount of pit-dirt, or 'rucks' pushing against the Bolton-bound side of the embankment was the cause. Certainly I remember that the lower level of that spoil-heap rose some three or four feet to almost cover the five-barred boundary fence which ran alongside the embankment.

"Because I couldn't recall the exact period of the calamity, I looked at the old Evening News' Indexes in the library, one of which said that on December 5, 1944, 'A subsidence on the railway line at Kearsley had caused a dislocation of traffic and a further one had blocked a private road leading from Kearsley Green to the Kearsley Sewage Works'." Mr Wolstencroft thinks that the same stretch of embankment slipped in two stages at about the same time.

"The 'private' road was just a dirt track that ran alongside the embankment from the above-mentioned tunnel to the old Kearsley Sewage Works situated between the dirt road and the river Irwell; not to be confused with the present-day Ringley Fold sewage works on the opposite side of the river.," he explains. "The old works was closed down when Kearsley was connected to the Ringley Fold complex."

So perhaps that is the answer to Mr Cooper's query about the trains being diverted during the war.

Mr Wolstencroft also came across reference to a previous railway subsidence, reported on January 2, 1939. The paper said: "A subsidence on the LMS railway line between Moses Gate and Farnworth stations today caused the complete stoppage of railway traffic between Bolton and Manchester on the usual line. Late last night part of the coping of a stone retaining wall about 25 feet high over the Darley culvert, about midway between the two stations, fell away, and it was found that the wall was bulging outwards and was cracked from top to bottom.

"Early morning trains were run over a single line, but later it was found that the ground underneath the up-line for a distance of 20 yards had sunk several feet, and it was decided to suspend traffic altogether. An express service between Bolton and Manchester is being maintained, however, trains being diverted through Radcliffe and Heywood."

It must have been a very heavy storm, because I have also looked back at the paper of the same date, and near the story about the Moses Gate landslide was a photograph of the Middlebrook, which had overflown its bank, making the footpath between Ladybridge Lane and Lostock station impassable (rather like the storm of June 14 this year).

Incidentally, Mr Wolstencroft tells me that his brother-in-law, Arnold Leach, also worked as a fireman at Crescent Road in the years immediately before the war, and wonders if he and Jim Cooper were acquainted - sadly, Arnold died in 1977.