Gone to the wall - a photo on Flickriver

Gone to the wall

Manchester Victoria station was the biggest station, and the headquarters, of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway - a complex, efficient and busy railway that is criminally under-studied by historians simply due to its sin of not serving London. It was never glamorous, with its black locomotives carrying coal and cotton, and its passenger trains going to Colne, or Todmorden, or Wigan.

Yet it was fascinating, and its station at Victoria especially so. In British Rail days, Victoria was messy, scruffy, unloved, complicated... and glorious. Even in the 1980s it was worth spending time on platform 11 (once the longest station platform in the world, combined with Exchange's main platform) watching the trains go by hauled by class 40s, 45s and 47s with DMUs beetling to and fro - while the Bury electric units glided in and out regularly from their bay platform.

The eastward route from Victoria consisted of a steep bank, almost from the platform end, to Miles Platting two miles away. Banking engines were always kept ready on this siding next to platform 12, and it was always known as 'the wall side' - strangely, as it was right in the centre of the station with no wall anywhere near it...

On this summer's day, LYR 'coffee pot' 0-6-0 engines 52341 and 52431 awaited their next duty while at platform 12 alongside, a Blackpool (Central) to Manchester express had terminated. The dirt is everywhere - the engines are dirty, there are piles of cinders next to the track, and the timber screen (erected after wartime bomb damage) clearly hadn't seen a lick of paint since it was put there. But it was a wonderful place to stand and watch trains (and the top decks of buses passing over the bridge just visible in the background).

Everything in this photo is long gone. Dirty, scruffy Manchester Victoria was largely replaced by a newer, more functional station with the AO Arena above - although thankfully, the main offices and frontage were retained. The new Victoria is also much smaller, with no need for newspaper loading platforms and no trains to Accrington via Heywood. In fact, it's now generally realised that Voctoria was over-pruned and with the growth in passenger numbers in the last 30 years, a couple more platforms might have been useful.

Victoria also now sees Metrolink, Greater Manchester's modern tramway system, and Victoria is one of its busiest and biggest stops. A new overall roof keeps passengers dry, and if you wander off a tram onto the main station concourse, a fair bit of Victoria's grandeur still remains. It's worth stopping off there for a look around.

If you'd like to know more about the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester and its collection of vintage buses, go to motgm.uk.

© Greater Manchester Transport Society. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction is strictly prohibited and may result in action being taken to protect the intellectual property interests of the Society.

Taken in: UK / England / Green Quarter (show map)

Taken on: January 1, 1956

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Sets appears in: • Rail • Manchester

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