Prologue
“Lowry looked at the Stockport Viaduct and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He said that he was haunted by it, the millions of bricks and the ordinary heroic men who had dug up the clay, baked the bricks, loaded them, unloaded them, cemented them together, and faded into exhausted obscurity, anonymously leaving their masterpiece.”
Paul Morley: The North
A traveller over the viaduct in the late nineteenth century would have seen through his carriage window the rooftops of many terraced houses, intermingled with textile mills, the town’s gas works and the infrastructure of the Cheshire Lines Committee in the form of George’s Road Sidings and Club House Sidings.
Today, the very busy M60 motorway passes through one of the viaduct’s 26 arches, giving the driver and passengers a brief view of its immensity: a giant construction, which reduces road vehicles to insignificance. On the other hand, the traveller by train glides over the viaduct, either Manchester-bound or Crewe-bound, and is rewarded with a panoramic view of Stockport town centre, the sinuous motorway slicing through the urban fabric, and on the approach to Stockport Edgeley station the River Mersey.
The London & North Western Railway decided to widen the viaduct by 24 feet in order to lay four tracks in the late 1880s. This was deemed necessary to accommodate the increase in rail traffic passing over the viaduct. Widening was completed in November 1889, in effect constructing a new viaduct alongside the first, but not keyed into it. Thus there are, strictly speaking, two viaducts bearing the Manchester–Crewe line over the valley of the Mersey.
This article seeks to record the annual progress in the construction of the main line viaducts in Stockport as seen through the eyes of press reporters who described what the saw for the benefit of readers.
The Manchester & Birmingham Railway
Francis Whishaw, a civil engineer, commented on pre-London & Birminghham Railway proposals to construct a line linking Manchester and Birmingham in his splendid book Railways of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1842. Included in the survey of existing railways was a survey of the fledgling L&BR, prefaced by a description of how the company came into existence:
“The Manchester and Birmingham, or, more properly, the Manchester and Crewe Railway, arose out of two distinct projects, which went before Parliament in the session of 1837: the one called the Manchester South Union, which was to run from Manchester to the Birmingham and Derby Railway, at Tamworth, a distance of 71 miles 46 chains; and the Manchester, Cheshire, and Staffordshire Railway, the main line of which was to form a communication between Manchester and the Grand Junction Railway, near Stafford, a distance of 50 miles 71 chains.”
George Stephenson was to engineer the former railway, John Rastrick the latter. In 1836 a Parliamentary contest was refereed by a Government-appointed military engineer (not named by Whishaw who examined the possibility of
