Dinting Vale Viaduct

The modern-day Glossop branch line originally opened as the Woodhead Line in December 1845, which linked Sheffield to Manchester. It was closed in 1981 leaving only the Manchester to Glossop/Hadfield section still in operation. The viaduct over the River Etherow at Broadbottom had been completed in December 1842, extending train services to Broadbottom, with the contract for the Dinting viaduct being let in June that year. In August 1844 the bridge was opened allowing trains to reach Hadfield and Glossop from Manchester. The original construction of the two bridges used laminated timber arches. The first electric train travelled over in 1954. The scheme cost £6.4 million.

Dinting is much the larger of two similar viaducts on the line (the other being the Broadbottom Viaduct), both of which are significant for their height. It has four main spans, each of four ribs, flanked by eleven brick-built, semi-circular approach arches, each with a fifty-foot (fifteen-metre) span—four at one end and seven at the other. Seven intermediate supporting piers were added in 1919, constructed of blue brick and irregularly spaced to avoid the road and river beneath, thus resulting in the loss of the viaduct's symmetry. This alteration was criticised by the architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner.