Old Ford railway station


Old Ford was a railway station in Old Ford, north of Bow, in east London. It was opened on 1 February 1865 by the North London Railway. It was situated between Victoria Park and Bow, and was located on Old Ford Road, east of the junction with Lefevre Road.
On 22 July 1867, two workmen were killed at Old Ford when a freight train collided with a vehicle due to being misrouted by incorrectly set points. The men were in a team loading rails onto a lorry in a siding when the train approached the station and its driver noticed that the points were set to lead his wagon into the siding. The train driver applied his brakes and sounded the whistle, and the men who were engaged in loading the lorry, with the exception of two that were on board the lorry, had time to get out of the way. The subsequent impact destroyed the lorry, killing one of the two men and injuring the other so seriously that he later died.
Old Ford station was closed in 1944 after damage during the Blitz cut off the railway east of Dalston Junction. The station buildings were demolished when the East Cross Route was built alongside the railway alignment in the late 1960s as part of the aborted London Motorway Box scheme. The track was subsequently lifted in the early 1980s, and a terrace of houses built in its place.