page_title: Fallowfield Loop railway line
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Fallowfield Loop railway line / History
caption_attribution_description: English: St Werburgh&#39;s Road Metrolink station, Chorlton, CTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt; &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" id="geograph"&gt; &lt;head&gt; &lt;title&gt;St Werburgh&#39;s Road Metrolink station, Chorlton:: OS grid SJ8293&#160;:: Geograph Britain and Ireland - photograph every grid square!&lt;/title&gt; &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /&gt; &lt;meta name="description" content="The South Manchester Line opened as far as the new stop near St Werburgh&#39;s Road in July 2011. The line uses part of the trackbed of the former South District heavy rail line, last used by passenger traffic in the 1960s. To the... more" /&gt; &lt;meta name="ICBM" content="53.438789472241, -2.2658052328698"/&gt;	&lt;meta name="DC.title" content="Geograph:: St Werburgh&#39;s Road Metrolink station, Chorlton:: OS grid SJ8293"/&gt; &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="Monitor" href="http://s1.geograph.org.uk/templates/basic/css/basic.v7747.css" media="screen" /&gt; &lt;link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://s1.geograph.org.uk/favicon.ico"/&gt; &lt;link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml" href="/photo/2553190.kml"/&gt; &lt;link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="Geograph Britain and Ireland search" href="/stuff/osd.xml" /&gt; &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://s1.geograph.org.uk/js/geograph.v7635.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt; &lt;/head&gt; &lt;body&gt; &lt;a title="Geograph home page" href="/"&gt;Geograph - photograph every grid square&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a title="Grid Reference SJ8293&#160;:: 116 images" href="/gridref/SJ8293"&gt;SJ8293&lt;/a&gt;&#160;: St Werburgh&#39;s Road Metrolink station, Chorlton near to Withington, Manchester, Great Britain.
context_page_description: The Fallowfield Loop railway line was a local railway route in Manchester, England. Trains on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway line from Sheffield Victoria and Guide Bridge used the Loop to access Manchester Central railway station. Some express trains including the Harwich-Sheffield-Manchester-Liverpool boat train used the line.
  The line was fully opened in 1892 and remained in use until 1988, the stations at Hyde Road, Levenshulme South, Fallowfield and Wilbraham Road having closed in 1958 following the withdrawal of passenger services.
  Reddish Depot was built adjacent to the line in 1954, to maintain the new fleet of electric trains for the Woodhead Line, and remained open until 1983.
context_section_description: The initial section of the Fallowfield Loop line was opened by the MS&LR (Cheshire Lines Committee) between Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Fallowfield on 1 October 1891. The following year, the remaining section between Fallowfield and Fairfield opened on 2 May 1892. The line provided a new route for the MS&LR to run trains from Sheffield into Manchester and local stopping services ran from Fairfield and Gorton on the Hope Valley line to Manchester Central via Hyde Road, Fallowfield and Chorlton-cum-Hardy before joining a section of line from Old Trafford into Manchester Central.
  In 1897, the MS&LR became the Great Central Railway and in 1923 the line was absorbed into the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). Over this period, the Fallowfield Loop line suffered from competition from alternative rail services into Manchester provided by the LNER from Levenshulme and later from the electric trams. By the 1930s, the LNER had greatly reduced the stopping services and mostly used the line for express trains. After 1948, the line was under the ownership of the nationalised British Railways. Briefly, consideration was given to electrification of the line, but instead the local stopping services were withdrawn and Fallowfield station was closed to passenger services on 7 July 1958. Express services out of Manchester Central continued to use the line until that terminus was closed in 1969 following the Beeching cuts. For another two decades, the line was used by freight trains until the line closed completely in 1988.
  In 1954, a traction maintenance depot was built alongside the Fallowfield line at Reddish to service the new Class EM1 and EM2 electric locomotives and the Class 506 units on the newly electrified Woodhead Line. After the Woodhead line closed in 1981, the Reddish Depot activity was reduced to servicing trains on the Glossop Line until it was closed in May 1983. Servicing of the Class 506 units was then transferred to Longsight depot, until the Glossop line was converted to 25 kV AC in December 1984. Following closure, Reddish Depot was demolished. The site remained derelict until the late 2000s when the site was redeveloped for housing.
caption: The junction with the former Midland Railway at St Werburgh's Rd; the cycle path is seen veering off left towards Fallowfield
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