A lost local station

Areas have quite a bit history and one village in this conurbation certainly is one that within living memory had coal mines although later on people transferred to mines in nearby Biddulph or Holditch, near Newcastle Under Lyme.

Coal had to got out to where it was needed - the vast potteries and steelworks of our region - so the North Staffordshire Railway Company built a spur for it where it was on the "Loop Line" an overground local train network covering most of the area  to which many of us feel ought to be reinstated given the appalling peak hour road traffic here.

The line was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway on 9 October 1848 but the station at Mow Cop did not open until the beginning of January 1849 and closed in 1964 under the "Beeching Cuts together with Scholar Green station.

It was immortalised that year in the song Slow Train by Flanders and Swann.

Until 2002 the signal box pictured while not in use was still "in situ" but is now preserved privately within the former industrial village.

The trains still go past it from Stoke Station just outside the city in Stoke itself through Congleton on towards Manchester in the North of England.

Rather like here, bits of our industrial past can - just - be spotted while ours is literally beneath ground with dramatic subsidence in spots.