This bridge is from Phoenix Sidings to Mill Street in Stockton c1976. Photograph courtesy of Alastair Smith 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
This bridge is from Phoenix Sidings to Mill Street in Stockton c1976. Photograph courtesy of Alastair Smith
Those of us that are one of the hims ancient and modern remember the scrap yard when it housed very little else than parts of old aeroplanes. Hours of safe fun ( well fairly safe) could had by a bunch of adventurous lads of seven or so from Hutchinson and Wellington Streets clambering all over cockpits,machine guns and wings from both the Luftwaffe and the RAF. We were all fans of Biggles and relished a scrap with Von Stroheim ( Take that you Nazi swine!!)The Phoenix sidings provided easy access to the flat ground that was littered with WW2 scrap. Happy happy days.
Old Lamps and Gauges – When I was an apprentice, mid 60’s being located at the end of Phoenix Sidings gave me and a couple of other trainees a great opportunity to explore Thompson’s Scrap Yard during lunchtimes and breaks. Just the other side of the wall there were great big steam engines on the tracks waiting to be scrapped. We stripped off many lamps and gauges, did nothing with them, just if we could work it loose it came off, something different to do I suppose. To think now in a couple of directions, one the price they would fetch now and two the historical value of them. At this point on the time line would they have been any plane wrecks over there or am I having someone’s memories, instead of my own, hearsay? Roy.
Is this the bridge at the end of Dixon Street where if you go over it you can come out at the bottom of Durham Road? If so I used to train spot as a kid and stand on the brigde getting covered in steam when the trains went past.
Some of us spent most of our school holidays on or around this bridge, ostensibly trainspotting. From here there was the occasional magnificant view of a powerful streaker [steam engine rather than nudist] leaving the station. Of course, the time between arrivals and departures was spent “making our own amusement” like sitting in cockpits in the scrap yard behind the Pheonix works or breathing in the sickly smells at the glue factory. Sometimes we were more daring and down near the railway cottages we laid six inch nails on the line. After an engine had passed over them they emerged like knife blades. We also put coppers on the line (but it made a mess of their uniforms, sorry).
This bridge is the one from Phoenix Sidings to Mill Street and shows the extent of the housing clearance of the seventies on the North side of the High Street. Robinsons Tower can be seen along with other buildings from what is left of Nelson Terrace.