On Stretford Station with a bit of our railway past

It is 35 years since the last train ran from Stretford station which means that memories of a time before the tram will be fading

Stretford Station, April 1961

I briefly used the station back in the 1970s and had no idea of its history or the railway line.

It had been opened in 1849 by the Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway and was in part designed to transport food grown in Altrincham and Stretford into the heart of Manchester and in time would challenge the Duke's Canal as the main means of carrying heavy goods in to Manchester.

I have no doubt it would have created quite a stir.

The men who built the line were viewed at best with suspicion and at worst with fear.  They had a well deserved reputation for hard drinking and rough behaviour which is no surprise given the dangers of the work they undertook.

Central Station, April 1961

And there may well have been a few of  our farm a labourers who were taken on to do some of the least skilled work while some of our farmers and market gardeners would have taken advantage of the line to move their crops to the Manchester markets.

But its impact was also to start a wave of house building along Edge Lane.

The train offered the quickest way into town and allowed those who earned a living in the city to escape to what was still the countryside.

Of course by the time I used the train Edge Lane and the surrounding area had long lost any semblance of countryside, but the station still looked like an old fashioned railway, which is where my fiend Ann comes into the story.

She “found these the other day, tucked away. Stretford station in 1961, and Manchester Central, probably a similar date. I used to travel from Stretford to Oxford Road Station, spending my time on the journey drawing the other passengers.”

And so after sixty-two years a little bit of what an old railway station looked like is here to see again.

Now that is not so daft given that Stretford has become a Metro Stop with shiny yellow trams and Central having long lost its trains is now an Exhibition Centre.

Pictures; Stretford and Central Stations, April 1961 courtesy of Ann Love

A day in the life of Central Station …. 1978

I am back with some snaps of the city I took nearly half a century ago.

Snaps are those pictures often taken with a cheap camera on the spur of the moment, and pretty much forgotten and lost soon afterwards.

And these of the old Central Railway Station are just such.  

They were taken with a modest camera, on a day exploring bits of the city.

I have much better images in the collection, many in black and white which do much greater justice to the that stunning wall of glass and iron but these I like because they are just snaps of a stroll round what had become a car park but had all the features of its former self.

So, while there will be many who remember it’s existence as a place to park up and plenty more who will have caught a train south to the suburbs, the Peak District even London those memories will be fading.

Leaving me just to say I missed the trains by just a few months as Manchester Central closed just before I washed up in Manchester in 1969.

That said I have written about it and continue to visit the place now that it has become an exhibition centre.*

And that’s it.

Location; Central Railway Station

Pictures; Railway Station, and car park, 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Central Railway Station, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Central%20Railway%20Station

Grab it while you can ……. views of Central Railway Station*

This is in the way of a public information warning ……. take your pictures of the old Central Railway Station roof while you can.

Now I know the front is secure, and you can get clear views of the graceful arch of glass and iron from Windmill Street.

But the rear is another matter.

Once before the closure of Central it was the impressive sight passengers would get as the train pulled into the station, albeit you might have to stick your head out of the window to see it.

And then for years it was still possible to get good pictures from the metro stop, before temporary buildings went up in front of it.

But new developments rising from Windmill Street are beginning to obscure the view from the tram stop.

So I suggest you take your pictures soon

Location; Deansgate Castlefield

Pictures; the former Central Railway Station roof, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Central Railway Station, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Central%20Railway%20Station

So what would you have done with the old Central Station in the heart of Manchester?

Now you will have to be a certain age to remember this image of the old Central Station before it was transformed into G-Mex.

And even older if you used it as a car park and of course older still if you caught a train from one of its nine platforms.

It opened in 1880 and closed to passengers in 1969.

I missed it by a couple of months and only discovered it in the late 1970s when I wandered in and photographed the interior.

Sadly the pictures have long since been lost, so I was very pleased when my friend Ann sent this one taken by her husband sometime around 1978.

Like other disused railway stations it suffered from dereliction, the indignity of being used as a car park and was damaged by fire.

But in 1982 it was bought by the Greater Manchester Council and work began to convert it into an exhibition centre.

This was a bold and imaginative plan and by one of those odd coincidences I got to see the work in progress sometime in 1985 or ’86, in the company of John Smith the leader of the Labour Party and Keith Bradley who went on to become the first Labour MP for Manchester Withington.

And just six years after G-Mex was opened part of the railway track that once ran into Central was adapted to take the Metro link which today is being extended to accommodate the Second City Crossing.

Like many who use the line I often gaze across at that great arched structure of iron and glass and reflect on just what was saved and how it could all have been so different when Howard photographed the building.

Picture; Central Station, 1978, from the collection of Howard Love

Posters from the Past ........... no 3 Manchester Central and an adventure

“What if” Peter said “we take an iconic Manchester building and make it a bit more special by turning it into a period poster ...... the sort we grew up with.”

Now that I thought just had to be a brilliant project combining my love of old steam railways with that sense of magic and adventure that came with taking a train journey and of course Peter’s talents as an artist.

So here we are at Manchester Central Railway Station in the style of the sort of poster which was popular from the 1920s.

And all that was left was for me to write a story, and here I cheated falling back on one I wrote three years ago and revisited in 2016.

For this I feel no shame and would just point to the avalanche of repeats on the telly and the wireless, and if it is good enough for Morecombe and Wise and the Two Ronnie’s that will do for me.

So sit back in the waiting room of Chorlton Railway station for the 9.45 from Central.

It is Sunday April 7th 1957 and I am on Chorlton railway station waiting for the train from Central which left at 9.45 am and is due here just twelve minutes later.

The weather according to the forecast is promising, for “after frost at first, areas will have a fine, mainly sunny day, with normal or slightly higher temperature”* which will gives us about 8⁰C or a little bit more.

And that I reckon is just right for a ramble in the countryside which is what we would have been planning to do on that April morning back in 1957.

This I know from a delightful poster which British Railways published in that year**  advertising Special Excursions to Chinley, Edale, Hope, Bamford and Hathersage.

It is of course a journey that can no longer be made by rail, but back in 1957 our station still had another ten years before it was closed and there are quite a few people who remember making the trip into the Hope valley by train from Chorlton.

All of which makes the advert by British Railways a valuable piece of history, for not only do we have the journey times for this long vanished service but also the cost.  So from Chorlton it cost 4/3d for a return ticket to Hope and took just 19 minutes.

These were “organised rambles, with leaders provided, details of the routes to be taken and walks for both individuals and parties.”

So having done the ramble the train back would have left Hope at two minutes past seven arriving back in Chorlton at about 8.10 in the evening.

It is a journey I would have loved to have made, not least because it was while in Hope recently that we decided to take up serious walking.  But sadly back in 1957 I was just eight years old and living in London.

Location; Manchester





Poster; Manchester Central, © 2016 Peter Topping

Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Pictures; from Manchester Railway Termini, E.M.Johnson, Foxline Publishing,  1987

*The Observer April 7th 1957

**Special Excursions to Chinley, Edale, Hope, Bamford and Hathersage, from Manchester Railway Termini, E.M.Johnson, Foxline Publishing,  1987

Central Station observing the little things

I don’t have an exact date but this photograph of the old Central Station crops us in so many collections which always put it sometime either side of 1900 that I am comfortable with that.

What I want to do is explore some of the detail of the picture.  And the obvious  place to start is that the fine canopy which stretched from the station’s entrance out to the road providing shelter for what appear to be some of the grander passengers arriving by horse drawn carriage.

And there are plenty of horses, some pulling elegant coaches, others neat little cabs and still more hauling the humble cart.  But away near the entrance to the station, under the canopy is a motor car.

But it is what is going on outside that intrigues me.  Just outside the station two men carry on a conversation by the lamp post while a little away to the right a carter attends to his horse.

A little closer to the station entrance a man rubs his chin as his attention is caught by the photographer, while others just ignore him.

I would like to think that perhaps one of the figures in the picture is from Chorlton, given that the station served the township but that is pure romantic tosh and best left alone.

Picture; from the collection of Rita Bishop, courtesy of David Bishop

Central Station, the one I just missed

Central Station was another I just missed.  

It closed in the May of 1969, just a few months before I arrived.  And in the way these things work it was a good few years before I came across it, and by then it had become a car park, which I suppose was the ultimate form of indignity for what had once been a proud example of 19th century public transport, reduced to a storage space for a less glamorous way of travel

Still that I guess saved it and allowed in time for it to be converted into the exhibition centre, which is pretty much how I first came across it.  I had sneaked in during the late 1970s took a few pictures of the place but it was during its conversion that I got to fully explore the building.  Along with my old friend Keith Bradley and the late Labour leader John Smith we were invited to watch the progress of conversion from 19th century railway station to 20th century exhibition hall.

Now I never took any photographs which was a pity, because there was much to see.

It was built between 1875 and 1880 by the  Cheshire Lines Committee, and was officially opened on 1 July 1880. A temporary wooden building was erected at the front of the station to house the ticket offices and waiting rooms.  It was planned that these would be replaced when a much grander building including the offices and a hotel were built.  This would have been similar to the one at St Pancras Station in London, but it never happened.  The Midland Hotel was built opposite and the wooden ticket office remained.

I do have a soft spot for Central, not least because it was where trains from Chorlton would have terminated.   I would have liked to have been one of the thousands who travelled into the place every day arriving under its impressive roof of iron and glass.  These were and still are one of the marvels of the railway age.  Central’s roof was 168 meters in length with a span of 64 meters which at its highest rose 27 meters from the platform floor.

It is a graceful arch of light which must have impressed all who saw it for the first time, and showed off Victorian engineering at its best.  And if you want a contrast just across the road is the old Liverpool Road Railway Station built just 50 years earlier. There the roof of the carriage shed is a simple wooden construction resting on cast iron pillars and would not have been out of place in a building made a hundred years earlier.  Indeed remove the iron supports and substitute wooden posts and you could almost be in a medieval barn.  Not so Central Station. It was the end point in railway engineering and one that sadly I and I suppose many people took for granted.  Shame really because it is a pretty impressive place.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Central Station in 1955 by H. Milliagan, m62751 and in 1964 by C.E. Poole m 62772,and finally in 1971, by M. Luft, m62772