And there they were: gone. Untouched and unused for decades, harmless and unobtrusive, but a symbol of decay and stagnation; a visual acceptance of stasis. Or just a pallet of railway sleepers? Last season I wrote about the club ‘Going Places’ in a mocking lament to our magnetic hold on mid-table; our bewitching connection with 13th place. But then the they disappeared, and it seemed perfectly fitting that the railway sleepers had finally gone places before even the club had.

Part of me felt a wave of optimism, as if the fatal expiry of the sleepers could finally act as the trigger to cast greatness upon us. It seemed uncanny that the docile, sloth-like, cumbersome deadweights should exit stage left just as cultural change was sweeping through the club, enacted by Marcelo Bielsa. This was Leeds United definitively and conclusively leading from the top. Perhaps.

Had someone finally read the chapter on ‘Being bothered’ in the great book of how to run a successful football club? Except that neatly left atop the flat roof extension to the North West Corner Stand was the deceased blue Entrance 7 sign, still lying prone and exposed, like a stranded Herring Gull on a sea-dredged Lancashire shoreline, maintaining the distressed position it abruptly took up some time in the late 1980s. Probably.

So nobody is ‘that’ bothered. Which alerted my mind to the many possibilities of the sleepers’ eventual whereabouts. Somehow I needed closure, to allow my conscience to rest on an uneasy chapter and the confusing strands that disrupt and direct our destiny.

Had my wistful scorn and derision finally woken the club up to the folly of their restful domain on top of the Entrance 7 turnstile block? Well, no, it seems they had gone to actually be used somewhere, abruptly swapping empowering, romantic melancholia with lumbering, industrial functionality in classic Leeds United fashion. I got in touch with a contact on the ground staff who I spoke to while researching my Elland Road book, and after 20-odd years it seems there is finally a use for them. They have been transported to Thorp Arch to form a border on some banking.

Which seems poignant and appropriate in a ‘what they would have wanted’ kind of way, except that we hope to completely bulldoze Thorp Arch and relocate the whole kit and caboodle in the next five years, and who’s going to be thinking about those desperate railway sleepers when Waitrose or Mr Fat Cat moves in to build his gated community of cheerless townhouses?

Furthermore, I learnt that the sleepers had actually been used at Elland Road and served a purpose within my lifetime; as tracks for a cherry picker to run on when the ground was uneven. But only in pre-season. I don’t know when or how often they were used, and my mind involuntarily raced with horror as I contemplated whether the club had used ANY form of wood grain preserve on them, or had them load tested, and now in truth, I’m left with more questions than answers.

Particularly as to whether their disappearance is anything to do with our upturn in form, and whether they represented a curse heaped on the club when a passing Gypsy pissed on them in the late 1800s, when in reality they are now closer to the everyday mechanics of Leeds United’s fortunes than ever.

Some stories leave you pining for more, but if we’re Going Places, then let’s just be glad that we are, because the future is out there waiting, while there those secretly roguish and maverick railway sleepers finally were: gone. ⬢