On leaving Didsbury Station with loco 45602 in 1954 and recreating the journey by tram 44 years later

The one I wrote in 2013.

I couldn’t resist another journey on the new tram from Chorlton to Didsbury Village.

Until last week no passengers had travelled the route for nearly half a century.  It had from 1880 taken people from Central Station south out through Chorlton and Didsbury on into Derbyshire.

But the service had closed in 1967 and we have had to wait till now to  do the journey again.

And in one of those classic then and now stories here is the  old Didsbury Station in 1954 as an express train pulled by Locomotive-45602 is passing through.  Michael Baxandale tell me that "the loco is the Stanier Jubilee 45602, British Honduras, 1935-1965, headed in the up direction, that is, south-east.  I (can just about) recall standing on the footbridge when a (steam-hauled) London express came through.  By the time they had reached Didsbury they were going at a hell of a pace.”

Didsbury Station was opened in the January of 1880 and by 1900 over 200,000 tickets were sold from the station while a decade later it was served by 38 trains running south and 40 running north with a frequency of every ten minutes in  peak time.

Now the new metro stop is a little to the south of the  station and lacks some of the elegance of the old place, but then when it comes to steam and railways I am a bit of a romantic.

A flaw which my mother was always quick to point out should be guarded against when it came steam engines, for as she often pointed out “they were smelly dirty and noisy” and woe betide anyone who had put their washing out on the line as an express train went past.  Romance and majesty might be the image as the locomotive swept past but the chances were it had left a calling card of soot on the white sheets.

So I shall just leave you with Peter Topping’s painting of the tram and the unromatic can reflect on the clean quiet journey to be had by tram number 3014 as it gets ready to leave for East Didsbury.

I on the other hand while I travel the Metro with pleasure will lament the loss of loco 45602 as it hauls its way north out of the station  accompanied by the sound and smell of steam doing it magical business.

Pictures: painting of tram at Didsbury Village © Peter Topping 2013 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk and Locomotive-45602 and train heading north to Manchester in 1954, m63444, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council