The Pickle Bridge Railway Line was introduced by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in the 19th century (1874-1952) and ran through Bailiff Bridge connecting Brighouse & Wyke along the way to other towns and cities you could even get a direct line to London from here.
Bailiff Bridge had its own station off Birkby Lane built around 1881 but closed in 1917 and was later destroyed by fire in 1929. The line itself suffered several setbacks and its demise was probably due to the problems faced at the time it was built, some local land owners refused to allow the line to be built on their land (this is also thought to be the main factor why it took 27 years from the first conception of this railway line until it was built and ironically it only lasted 71 years in total and many of these years without passenger trains) so the line had to be built around this land on the edge of Bailiff Bridge’s boundary with Wyke they built an elaborate section of 22 viaducts called Wyke Viaducts (known locally as the Red Lion Viaducts but maybe today should be called the Wyke Lion Viaducts?) to not only to cross over the busy A58 Lancashire to Leeds main road but to avoid some of these private land owners where just above these viaducts it joined into the main line coming from Lightcliffe Station on its way from Halifax to Bradford.
Much of the land around Bailiff Bridge was heavily mined and some of this railway was constructed over disused mines leading to some land movement and causing some subsidence leading to the line becoming unsafe and in 1948 it was closed to passenger trains before finally in 1952 the line was closed for good. Over the years since its closure the lines and in particular the viaducts and bridges became unstable and most of the viaducts and the bridge that crossed the A641 on the Wyke border were demolished for safety reasons, the demolition of the viaducts was quite spectacular with Roy Atkinson and his team owner of a Halifax Quarry and a resident of Brighouse used dynamite to blast the viaducts down one weekend. Most of the tracks still remain with the bridge over the A58 still intact although caped and leading nowhere along with the bridge over the B649 Birkby Lane.
Also if you look carefully here along the banking on the Cleckheaton side of the bridge you will see some remains of steps leading up to the station and along with some of the old white tile bricks are sadly the only remains of Bailiff Bridge Railway Station.
