WE'RE zipping back in time almost 70 years this week, to York in the 1950s.

Sandwiched between the post-war austerity of the late 1940s and the pop-art and pop-music boom of the swinging Sixties, it was an odd sort of decade.

But there was a lot going on in York - whether it was accidents at York Railway Station, the demolishing of an old church, the widening of a road bridge, or the building of an entirely new road linking Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate with Peaseholme Green. No prizes for guessing which much-loved road that was...

Our photographs today, all culled from a rarely-used archive of old photos here at the Press, tell the story...

1. The scene on platform 12 at York Station on the morning of August 4, 1958, when the Sunderland to York train, pulled by the steam locomotive Colombo, overran the buffer stops, mounted the platform and tore into the tobacco kiosk. Remarkably, the locomotive managed to continue in use for a further six years, until November 1964

2. An alternative view of the Colombo following its collision with platform 12 in 1958. This view clearly shows how the locomotive's momentum carried it up onto the platform. 'Way Out' and 'To platform 14' say two station signs, helpfully. We assume te three men in the far left of the photograph are railway engineers, wondering either how this could have happened in the first place, or how on Earth they were going to move the engine...

3. The building of Stonebow. This photograph, taken in August 1955, shows the western end of the street near Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Gate nearing completion. Look carefully and you can make out St Crux church hall in the distance

4. Another view showing the final stages of the making of Stonebow. The view is along the street from the Peaseholme Green end. The Black Swan is on the left with the 1930s rebuild of the Woolpack Inn on the right. In the background is the very large Post Office Telephone Exchange which was opened in 1955

5. This August 1958 view of Parliament Street might give some idea about why the city fathers were so keen to move York's regular market out of the street and into Newgate, even though Parliament Street had been built (in the 1830s) by Act of Parliament specifically to hold the market. There's very definitely a 'morning after the night before' feel to this photo...

6. The St Helen's Road railway bridge in Dringhouses, pictured in 1957, before it was widened. There's a wonderfully old world feel to it: the pace of life back then was obviously very different...

7. St Mary's Church, Bishophill Senior, in 1953. The church, which has long since been demolished, dated to before the Norman conquest: it had a late Saxon nave and was recorded in the Domesday Book, according to the York History website.

An aisle was added in the twelfth century and a doorway from the same period which survived until the church was demolished in the 1960s. There were also some Roman walls underneath the church.

There was considerable local concern when the idea of demolishing the church was first suggested in the late 1950s. Nevertheless, the demolition went ahead in 1963. Some of the church's fittings were moved to St. Clement’s Church on Scarcroft Road.

Stephen Lewis