Leeds Midland Road depot is a locomotive and rolling stock maintenance facility located in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. The site is just to the south-west of station on the line between Leeds and Castleford. It services the Heavy Haul and Intermodal freight locomotives for the Freightliner freight operations company. Although the facility is part of the same parent company, it is a separate arm known as Freightliner Maintenance Limited. Whilst it is primarily a diesel serving depot, it also maintains electric locomotives and wagons from the Freightliner fleet.
History
The £1.75 million site was opened in 2003 by London & North Western Railway as a maintenance facility and was located on the former Balm Road sidings that had been used to offload quarry products. LNWR were contracted to maintain up to 30 class 66 locomotives that worked in the Yorkshire area at the site, with heavier maintenance being carried out by Electro-Motive. In 2006, Freightliner Maintenance Limited was formed and it then assumed control of operations at Leeds. FML is a "free-standing subsidiary" of the Freightliner Group and was instituted when the number of locomotives and wagons the company leased or owned increased with an upsurge in traffic. Besides being a central point for maintaining the class 66 and class 70 fleets, both classes are based from here and the facility undertakes wagon maintenance. The site has a total of nine roads; the shed has two covered roads that have pits beneath them to allow access to the underside of wagons and locomotives, whilst the fuelling point also has two roads, but only one of these is covered. Outside of these, there are a further five roads for storage and maintenance. A crane spans roads 3 and 4 to allow for wheelset changes on locomotives and wagons. As the site is north of Stourton Freightliner terminal, locomotives in need of repair are often hauled dead-in-train to Stourton and transferred to Midland Road for servicing or repair. Locomotives on routine maintenance find their way to Midland Road by hauling scheduled services. Besides the container trains passing through Stourton to the south, many Heavy Haul trains run past the depot too, which makes switching locomotives easy and cost-effective. With the downturn in tonnages of coal moved by railfreight in the United Kingdom, several examples of Class 70 locomotives have been stored on the non-maintenance sidings that border the running lines to the south. In November 2017, Freightliner opened up a new maintenance facility at Crewe Basford Hall that has taken on some of the work previously undertaken at Leeds Midland Road, particularly the electric locomotives as there is no overhead wire access into Midland Road. The heavier maintenance work will still be carried at Leeds though. The site is under threat from the HS2 project into central Leeds. The draft environmental statement for the West Midlands to Leeds arm of the HS2 line states that
