The author has a vague recollection of his student days when the following title of a fellow student's dissertation included the words, ‘Oldham – the Town on a Hill’. This student had realised that Oldham was not only seven miles to the north east of Manchester but that the town stands on the western slopes of the Pennine Hills,and was indeed a town on a hill. A journey by road or rail to the centre of Oldham involved an ascent. St. Mary's Parish church stands 705.8ft above sea level.
Oldham was noted for its importance as a cotton spinning town: in 1900, to take just one year, there existed a forest of mill chimneys, from which plumes of smoke rose into the air or drifted downwards into the streets below. The author is indebted to Professor D. A. Farnie's introductory contribution in the book entitled The Cotton Mills of Oldham by Duncan Gurr and Julian Hunt.
From this source we learn that during the Cotton Famine of the 1860s Oldham became “…the leading mill town in the world, consuming more raw cotton and spinning more yarn than any other single centre of the cotton industry”. Oldham became the metropolis of the textile machine making industry as well as the metropolis of cotton spinning, acquiring a vast advantage over other cotton towns. (Platt Bros., a large factory in Oldham, was known throughout the world for its output of cotton machinery.) The town's eminence in cotton spinning and textile machinery manufacture existed despite having no rivers or canals and no visble natural resources, save for modest deposits of coal. According to Professor Farnie, “for industrial development on the basis of the steam engine the town was favoured by its reserves of coal”. (Coal was mined in a number of localities and from the mid-nineteenh century fuelled the mills and factories, as well as domestic hearths.) Oldham was also relatively close to Manchester, the hub of a world cotton yarn market, and was fortunate in its central location between the West Riding and East Lancashire industrial regions.
As the world market in cotton expanded, Oldham responded by increasing the number of cotton mills: 1840 – 142, 1866 –260, 1883 – 318, 1907 – 327, 1913 – 337. The population in 1911 totalled 147,483.
In terms of communication with neighbouring towns and districts, Farnie (op cit) notes that ‘The Manchester and Leeds Railway by-passed Oldham but was linked to it by means of a branch line opened from Middleton Junction in 1842 and using an inclined plane at Werneth for two-fifths of its length”.
The purpose of this article is to describe the historical background of each of Oldham's railway stations. It is with the branch line to Oldham that this study of the town's five stations commences. Within the study, a number of short interludes revive long-forgotten dramatic episodes affecting Oldham's stations
