Denton railway station
Denton railway station is in Denton, Greater Manchester, England, on the Stockport–Stalybridge line. It is served by two trains a week, one in each direction on Saturday mornings.
The orientation of the line, running south-west to north-east, is a clue to the origin of Denton Station; it stands on the former mainline of the London & North Western Railway between Crewe and Leeds via Stockport. The London & North Western Railway had already completed its line to Manchester via Stockport and now looked to expand to reach the woollen districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire, building quadruple tracks all the way to Huddersfield and Leeds via the Standedge tunnel.[1]
The line between Guide Bridge and Heaton Norris Junction (north of Stockport) was surveyed by the Manchester and Birmingham Railway in 1845 (shortly before it became part of the London and North Western Railway), and opened in 1849. A new station was opened by the LNWR in 1888[2] and the route was quadrupled in 1889. Before the Railways Act 1921, it was served by trains from Stockport to Ashton, Oldham, Rochdale and Stalybridge. A very limited passenger service ran to Manchester. Stalybridge could also be reached via Hooley Hill and the Stalybridge Junction Railway. This route was opened in 1882 [3] by the LNWR to avoid the congested junction at Guide Bridge, but closed to passengers in 1950.
The older route via Guide Bridge remained a useful link between the northern and southern Manchester rail networks and this ensured its continued use by British Rail until the late 1980s – before May 1989, an hourly service ran on weekdays along the route. The re-routing of the Leeds–Huddersfield–Manchester express service to Manchester Piccadilly at the May 1989 timetable change made the service essentially redundant though, as travellers could then access south Manchester services directly at Piccadilly, and its frequency was substantially cut: by 1992, it had been reduced to just a single weekly train (the statutory minimum level necessary to avoid the requirement for formal closure proceedings).
North of the station is Denton Junction where the line divides, with the mainline going to Guide Bridge and the little-used branch to Ashton Moss. The latter route is normally used only by freight and empty stock transfer workings but is used also for diversions if the main line between Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly is closed for engineering work.
A further line to Droylsden diverged from this (34 chains (680 m) further on at Ashton Moss Junction), which at one time was used by direct trains from the East Lancashire Line to London Euston. That line was closed in 1969 and subsequently lifted. The LNWR built a short-lived station called Audenshaw on that line, which opened in 1888 and closed in 1905.
