Daimler Halt
Daimler Halt was opened soley for the benefit of the Daimler
Motor Company. In March 1917 its opening was announced by a local newspaper as
follows.
"Realising the inconvenience occasioned to their
employees in the absence of any railway station in close proximity to their
works, the Daimler Company have arranged with the London North western Railway
Company for the construction of a "Daimler Halt" at Sandy Lane on the Coventry
- Nuneaton line. This halt is now approaching completion and will be open for
traffic on Monday March 19th 1917. The platforms are 300 feet long. It will be
reserved exclusively for the use of employees of the Daimler Company, and will
not be open to the general public."
Records show that the station actually opened on 12th March
and it served the Daimler Company for 48 years. Parts of the platform could
still be seen into the 1980s. Apart from a rain shelter on either platform,
there were no station buildings other than a ticket collector's hut at the
steps leading down from Sandy Lane Road Bridge.
It is not generally known that a short branch line ran from
a point near the Coventry end of the station to the Coventry Cotton Mill which
was situated next to the Coventry Canal and which opened in 1861. The Cotton
Mill employed 400 people but was destroyed by fire in 1890, never to re-open.
By 1896 the building was occupied by the Great Horseless Carriage Co and it
was, in fact, the birthplace of the motor industry in Coventry.
The branch was therefore known at various times as the
Coventry Cotton Mill branch, the Widdington Branch (the Rev. S H Widdington,
vicar of St. Michael´s was mainly responsible for financing the mill to
provide work for people redundant from the declining ribbon trade), the Motor
Mills branch and the Daimler Works branch, was in use and worked by the LNWR
locomotives until the First World War. In fact the track was probably lifted
shortly before Daimler Halt was built.
The line crossed Sandy Lane by a level crossing. The
crossing keeper´s cottage still stands in Sandy Lane.
RW Kimber
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