Worsley Loopline was always there but lockdown has made people love it
How coronavirus has forced us to reevaluate the places where we live
Worsley railway station has been ridiculously busy of late, with hundreds of people visiting every day as they head out on journeys into the countryside.
And that’s quite something for a station that closed in 1969, a victim of the Beeching Axe, which mothballed branch lines and community rail hubs across the country.
The last ever passenger train to use the Tyldesley Loopline left Monton Green station at 10:48am on May 5 1969, then passed through Worsley Station bound for Liverpool.
Today people pass through on foot as they walk or run, or cycle, their way up or down what is know locally as the Worsley or Roe Green Loopline, a sweeping path starting in Monton and heading for miles and miles if you have the appetite.
Reached down a steep track from Worsley Road, the platforms of Worsley station are almost perfectly preserved, with wooden benches where people sit and wait for trains that never turn up.
At one time it was acclaimed as the scenic route - a line where travellers would pass natural beauty, including glistening streams and woodlands. Lockdown has made many more people realise that this piece of Salford still is a scenic route.
According to the disused stations website, the Tyldesley Loopline was opened by the London & North West Railway Company on 1st September 1864, to provide a link between Eccles (located on the famous 1830 Stephenson line between Manchester and Liverpool), and Wigan (located on the main West Coast line which ran from London to Glasgow).
Its purpose was to provide transportation between the various collieries that peppered the district.
Look around you as you walk today and there are clues to its former use in the shape steep banks, retaining walls and the unmistakable railway bridges under the M60 and Greenleach Lane at either end of Roe Green.
Members of a Facebook group for people who grew up in Worsley speak affectionately about standing at a gate in Lumber Lane as the train passed and putting pennies on the line so that they’d be squashed even flatter.
One recalls a father who worked on the line as a railway man. One person suggests that it used to be possible to catch a train in Monton that would take you to Glasgow - quite a thing in its day.
After the axe fell, however, there were several decades when the Loopline fell back into nature - unloved and under-utilised.
It’s not that long ago that it was a desolate and isolated spot, overgrown and intimidating. Back in the late 80s my car, a yellow Mini, was stolen and the police found it being dismantled on the Loopline near Walkden Road. It had been driven down by a gate near Worsley Pool.
Gradually, it has been improved with better footpaths and an increased sense of security. (NB. Sporadic crime still occurs).
Led by Salford Council, work to make £5m of improvements to the Loopline began in 2015 and were completed by 2018. Paths were widened and flattened with a surface of golden gravel to make them more accessible.
A couple of years ago, it was estimated that around 260,000 people had walked the Loopline in a single year. I’m betting today’s figures would show a massive increase.
Lockdown has made locals love it. I’m one of the hundreds of people who walk - and sometimes run - the Loopline every day.
Even a year ago it was relatively quiet but there’s now hardly ever a time when you’d feel alone.
Its beauty lies in its tranquility and sense of being somewhere other than the city, bordered by farmland, Duke’s Drive and Worsley Golf Course on its lower stretch between Monton and Worsley station; then the steep sides banks on the way up to Roe Green, when you the line forks and continues either to Ellenbrook and Leigh or Walkden, Little Hulton and Bolton.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Almost from my front door I can walk for miles and miles without having to walk alongside a road.
More recently, lots of other people have discovered they can do that too.
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