WLR 2 Penwortham Cop Lane Traditional Cache
the waltons A team: Loss of personal mobility!
WLR 2 Penwortham Cop Lane
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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This cache is one of the (first four) WLR (West Lancashire Railway) series marking stations on the long gone WLR. Located within 10 metres of the original Preston bound platform this one might be considered to be a ‘drive right up cache and dash’, if it were not for the 3 star difficulty rating for finding the container. NOTE, finding the cache does NOT involve access from the high-speed road that runs under the bridge!
Way back in the ‘50’s I often made the trip from New Longton Station to Southport on the West Lancashire Railway at a cost of 1/6d (7.5p) for the return journey. Sadly those days are long gone, the WLR having steamed it’s last in 1964. So in an effort to acknowledge the old railway that was, it is our intention eventually (this is one of our first four) to mark each of the original stations with a cache. If it proves possible to locate a cache in the immediate area of the original station this we will do, however much building and development has taken place since the closure, so in a lot of cases the cache may have to be an offset.
This one however is not off-set, and is located directly above what was the northeast bound platform. Looking over the fence at the cache location you would have seen the rails and platforms, now all you will see is the Penwortham by-pass which now occupies what was the WLR trackbed.
HISTORY… The railway on it’s way out of Preston had to make a climb of almost 20 metres to reach the flat plain between Penwortham and Longton and to reduce the gradient the track was in a deep cutting at this point. There wasn’t a station here originally, Cop Lane having been built 29 years later in 1911 after the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway took over. Access to the platforms was via steep stairway footpaths running down both cutting sides from either side of the Cop Lane bridge.
NOTE: The log is now a strip of 'Aquaskin' waterproof paper, and this material will only take ball-pen or gel-pen ink... PENCIL WILL NOT MARK IT... so BYOP.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Jvguva gur srapr, naq n ovg jbbqra