Today I walked the old road ........ Part Five

Journeys end was the Duke's Canal. But what the canal had been to the late eighteenth century the railway was to the nineteenth. After all as one writer said they were a device for making the world smaller, and their impact was immediate,
“..swifter than a bird flies … you cannot conceive what the sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible …when I closed my eyes, this sensation of flying was quite delightful and strange beyond description…”
Not that most of the people travelling on our road would have been able to afford the prices on the railway. Later, train fares did come down but in the early years of the Manchester South Junction & Altrincham Railway the people of Chorlton and Stretford might wonder at its brash speed and magnificent power but could only look. They might however have been employed on building it because while the really skilled work was done by navvies there was still casual employment for local farm labourers. Some may even have worked on the bridge which took the railway over the old road.

It still makes for an impressive sight, the two forms of transport which not only assisted in transforming the Industrial Revolution but which were about to wrench Chorlton out of centuries of isolation. The station at Stretford brought people with money who began to buy houses along the route from the station towards the village. Thirty years later another railway line with its station on the edge of the village was going to spark a second building boom on land which had been agricultural.
Picture; replica of the locomotive Planet 1830, from the collection of Andrew Simpson