Oldham: The Railway Town That Gave Up On Railways

so this behind me is a rare example of a disused railway tunnel which until very recently was still in use most disused railway tunnels in britain actually went out of commission in the 60s and 70s uh whereas this one was still used all the way up until 2009 so it both looks and feels very very different to most of the tunnels you can find in britain except there's another one just on the other side [Music] [Music] so today i've come back to my hometown of oldham thank you uh to look at this this epic railway tunnel this disused railway tunnel and the one beyond that as well there's two tunnels to look at but also to look at the rest of oldham's uh railway history um and see what happens to it how did this big industrial town on the edge of manchester in north west england um go from being chock full of railway infrastructure to having virtually nothing left at all what happened like how did this big town just lose all of its railway heritage so this is oldham once a thriving cotton town often claiming to be the cotton spinning capital of britain at one point it was also an incredibly important town on the railway system in the 19th century with 22 stations and halts falling within what is today oldham borough today only one remains greenfield station which is on the huddersfield line and is miles away from the town centre oldham town center was railway mad a landscape of cotton mills on a hillside overlooking manchester serviced by two major passenger stations and two major goods depots the first line to enter oldham was opened in 1842 just 12 years after the liverpool manchester railway made trains the future of public and industrial transport it branched off from the manchester leeds line from here in middleton to here in werner which included an incline of 57 meters the steepest working railway incline in britain but it was still too far from the town's centre and so plans were drawn up to bring the railway into part of town called month this meant tackling some high ground and subsequently two tunnels were cut when it was later extended to rochdale the famous oldham loop was created circling the town with rail this lasted for 146 years until 2009 when it was taken over by the metrolink light rail system until that diverted into the town centre leaving this part of the line here empty so today that loop line is used by the manchester metrolink system until it gets to werner and then it goes into the town center of oldham so this bit of track bed here the old loop line is abandoned so i won't have a look down here see if there's anything left to see but also to go in those two wonderful tunnels uh down that the wernifend um to see just the engineering challenge of bringing the railway age into this booming cotton town so where i am now is the old track bed of that loop line um and as you can hear i'm stood right next to the bypass in all them so the dual carriageway which swings to the south of oldham this is the old footbridge which until very recently was actually still open they take you right the way across the bypass but yes so the trains would come from rochdale across the famous mumps viaduct through mumps station and then swing southwards around the town centre towards manchester um so yeah as you can see today it's nothing so the problem with the metrolink taking over the line was that everything along it was obliterated so i've just been to mumps station where the station used to be and there's nothing there it's just completely flattened there's not a trace of it left the old subway which you have to get to get to the station that's gone can't find it and it's all overgrown um so yeah unlike other disused railway lines you might find which were just disused and abandoned and forgotten where you could find loads of relics of the past this oldham loop line there's no relics of the past um so yeah big big shame right so now i'm on the bridge over waterloo street which is all the way down there that's heading south by the way um and over here used to be a signal box an old railway signal box which i distinctly remember every time i caught the train um from oldham to manchester looking out the window trying to see the signal box because it's just a flashback um but yeah sadly it's not there anymore so immediately after the signal box all these sidings kind of billowed out into clegg street station which was where the small retail park is uh today so basically where matalan is in oldham was click street station and then there was another line which bent southwards towards ashton um unfortunately that's not there anymore as well that's all been flattened so on this line though um adjacent to clay street uh was central station uh which was just there where you can see the brick bridge coming up now uh that bridge itself is clegg street street now there's some great old photographs of uh both click street and central station neither very big especially central station not very big but very typical of lancashire yorkshire railway station architecture with the cast iron columns and the ornate canopies or beautiful pictures so clay street station was the largest of all them stations with a hydraulic lift four platforms and the only one with refreshment rooms now it was always a large goods depot um taking in everything from large bales of cotton um coal and lime things like that but by the 1960s a lot of the cotton mills around here have been taken over by mail order companies so um clay street station became a kind of a new lease of life as a mail order depot [Music] so [Applause] [Music] right so on we go into central tunnel um it's not a particularly long tunnel uh it's about 433 meters if that um but it's long enough and dark enough to give me the willies so yeah so as you'd expect there's quite a lot of these at the side the bits people could step in when a train's coming through the tunnel um it's quite interesting that there's stone on the wall there and then it goes up to brick i always like that i always like that i don't know why stone and then brick um so very interesting that's the whole way along as well i think um so far it has been uh but there's lots of other bits you can see the floor is um is stone it's still the the stone that had the track bed on it this is still the track bed basically without the track um but also there's all these bits of concrete there's bits of paraphernalia everywhere you know it showed that it was dismantled but left as well so look at this this um look how much these stones have eroded over there i mean look at that i've never seen stones quite so like dramatically eroded and i don't know why i don't know what could have caused that um i mean that's it's just coming a part of my hands um yeah is it why i don't know i've just never seen that before but that's yeah that's amazing it's um it's not good for the tunnel though right i didn't realize this at the time but i was actually pretty close to the middle of the tunnel here so this wall on the outer side of the curve has likely been eroded by winds traveling through the tunnel over the last 170 odd years [Music] [Music] okay so i've just come out of central tunnel there and now i'm in this quite deep cutting this is the deepest cutting in oldham um and yeah it's only very short you can see the other tunnel entrance down there the other portal of the tunnel down there that is werner tunnel i'm hoping i can get through this overgrowth to get there um as usual i'm going to end up battling through some vegetation but i think it'll be all right i think it'll be all right um it's crazy being down here though because i can hear the bypass and i can hear there's a somebody drilling something up there i don't know if there's a works or something um but yeah this is it's a strange feeling i've never never even thought about this part of oldham before let alone thought about coming down here um so i'm not entirely sure what is around but yeah it's great i mean these tunnels i mean look look at the mouth of that tunnel look at the portal tap how the shape just huge [Applause] more it's like the buddha tour of wilderness right so this is a pretty good example right because what i'm not looking at here is 19th century railway infrastructure really i'm looking for it but most of what i've got around me is from the 2000s the early 2000s when this was a converted from a railway line into a metrolink line temporarily so this to me looks like it's yeah the past 20 years so from that era when it was turned into a metrolink line i'm not sure exactly a bit of a retaining wall or something i don't know drainage behind there um but yeah so it's a old but new kind of journey i'm doing today i'm looking at so i'll keep looking right so this is the other tunnel this is werner's tunnel and you can see it's built very much structurally the same it's got that same um kind of distinctive shape uh this one is shorter and it's a straight line it's a dead straight line the other one had a slight bend in it so you couldn't see either end well you couldn't see the other end unless you got to the halfway point this one i can see the other end and i can see how short it is so that's quite reassuring actually so again like the last tunnel you've got stone at the bottom and then brick um but there's there's signs of more recent repairs here so pressure bricks there also like last 30 years or something uh yeah it's quite interesting um there's like an excess of mortar put between the bricks there like all over just like too much smarter not sure why they've done that must be a reason good reason for it makes a nice pattern though so yeah let's keep going right so this is the end of the line for me beyond there was the old werner station oldham's first ever station and a very very busy uh goods depot back in the day at the moment this area has been used for a private business um a haulage company i think um so i can't go beyond this gate um it'd be nice to see the portal properly from the other side um but yeah sadly not um so from here the line went in a straight line all the way to middleton junction and it was a shockingly steep hill going down to that so much so that the the line coming up in the opposite direction became known as the wernest incline and it was the steepest railway incline in the country that was superseded when they built a second line years later which would take we'll put a new line which take the railway through failsworth and holland woods that way and made the one of the incline in the middleton junction collection a bit defunct but yeah steepest railway incline in the country was just down there so what about the rest of oldham a second line entered from the east which was a branch line connecting the town to huddersfield there was also a minor railway which branched off into delft called the delft donkey line which i'll look at in another video a third line from the south connected ashton to oldham via park bridge finally the main oldham line was extended up to rochdale thus creating the oldham loop line like many places in urban britain oldham's railway story is one of incredible growth in the 19th century and slow decline into the 20th many of the lines around and into the town suffered during the beaching cuts of the macmillan and douglas home governments but managed to retain two mainline connections the huddersfield line through saddleworth and the oldham loopline running from manchester to rochdale craig street station was closed in 1959 and then central station closed in 1966 the loop line was finally killed off when the metrolink light rail system was brought to oldham mumps and wernith eventually closed with the closure of the loopline oldham became one of the largest town centres in the country without a mainline railway connection right so i'm back in the cutting now out of one tunnel heading towards the bendy tunnel and back to where i came from uh but yeah but having seen both tunnels now i know that neither of them are in a sorry state of repair both are very structurally sound so the reason oldham lost its railways hasn't to do with any sort of major million pound investment they needed in something like the tunnels it was just kind of it must have been a combination of people just favoring the cars over trains and of course the massive private privatization and the underfunding that the railways got anyway um i remember getting the the train from older mumps into manchester a long time ago now and uh the the station was just decaying it was just falling apart and there was just no investment so it's not surprising that passengers were put off i was put off sometimes i just think today i'm going to get the bus so that's what happens to the railways if you don't fund them if you don't give them the investment they decay and then they go away and we end up with something like this which was built a hundred nine years ago you know going parking back to the earliest days of the railways in britain which is a wonderful um structure it's it's clever what they've done is cut two tunnels um in the first place i mean oldham was difficult to get to because it's in such a hill and they figured it out and it's just yeah you get these just sat here like two sleeping giants so what i'll do in the next video is look at the other side of oldham where there still is a mainline train connection um but also what was lost as well that way because a lot was lost that way as well so i'll be looking at something called the delft donkey line um which took uh which was a a connection into saddleworth to the mills in saddleworth and also that includes um a long tunnel much longer than these two um lid gates and all so i'll be looking at that one um and that's a tunnel very very dear to my heart uh so i'll see in the next video cheers [Music] so [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Bee Here Now

Views: 87,826

Keywords: history of manchester, manchester history, british history, working class, industrial revolution, martin zero, abandoned, railway history, urbex, historic railways, northern history, oldham, mumps, oldham central, abandoned tunnels, beeching cuts, british railways, oldham history, werneth, oldham werneth, werneth incline, metrolink

Id: 3CPMj7dQzhw

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021