The ‘Prestwich Branch’
On a dull April Monday in 1916, as battle raged in Flanders, a new electric train service was quietly inaugurated in Manchester. The apparently humdrum local line to Bury deserves a place in railway history for successive innovations, from the Great War to the present day. The line opened in 1879, originally with intermediate stations at Crumpsall, Heaton Park, Prestwich and Whitefield. In the north the line joined the long-established East Lancashire Railway at Radcliffe on the approach to Bury Bolton Street station. It was not an easy line, with gradients of 1 in 57 facing northbound trains towards Heaton Park and 1 in 49 descending beyond Whitefield. There were tunnels at Heaton Park and Whitefield, and later also at Colly hurst on the approach to Victoria after a new connection was opened in 1904, passing below the main lines and bringing Bury trains into dedicated platforms in the terminal part of the station. The branch served developing suburban property expected to produce lucrative season ticket traffic (as indeed it did).
The Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway (LYR), headquartered in Manchester, was a progressive, profitable concern with suburban services around both Liverpool and Manchester. Since 1899 it had been led by Sir John Aspinall, a resourceful and dynamic manager. In Liverpool the company had converted five suburban sections to electric traction between 1903 and 1913 and its growing traffic encouraged consideration of other possible installations. Inner-suburban traffic had been drastically affected by the opening of electric tramways and the LYR was determined to recover such traffic, and also to attract more profitable longer-distance passengers. In the case of the Prestwich branch we have some contemporary figures supplied to the LYR board in 1914 for the effects of tramway competition since 1903. At Crumpsall, well-served by trams, traffic declined by 45% between 1900 and 1903. At Prestwich there was a 50% drop by 1903, 60%by 1914. Population growth at Heaton Park and Radcliffe had delayed the decline but by 1914 the picture there was similar. Excluding bookings from Bury itself the passaiger total for the line in 1914 was only 55.3 % of the 1900 total. Although slower, greater frequency and convenience, as well as cheaper fares, had favoured the tramcars, which also ran into the centre of Manchester. Aspinall had memorably noted “…electrification of railways is carried out not to save money but to make it” and this became LYR policy.
The branch stations and their distances are listed in Table 1.
It is notable that three stations
