Phantom Tram Tracks In Rochdale

Visited Rochdale today on one of my frequent trips out of town hunting for records and videos of interest. For what it's worth I didn't find anything particularly intersting other than half a dozen lounge classics for £0.25 a pop.

In Rochdale they are currently building a Metrolink tram extension from the railway station to the town centre bus station. While walking past the track construction works on Maclure Road I spotted these old Rochdale Corporation Tramway rails which had simply been buried in the tarmac when the old tram network was abandoned in 1949.

I've seen these things revealed by roadworks before such as when they were resurfacing the road outside of Stockport Town Hall. I excitedly pointed out this evidence of times past to the person sat next to me on the bus, who frankly couldn't have given a shit.

Walking downhill towards town along Drake Street I wonder what kind of effect all this work (there is no road traffic and certainly no parking on this segment of the street while the line is being constructed) is effecting local businesses and hope that the shop and cafe owners have negotiated good compensation from the council and/or local passenger transport executive.

It's walking along this street that I spot this second lot of previously buried tracks and am once again struck by the peculiar fact that these tracks, which quite possibly have been in situ for around 90 years, are now being removed to make way for a new tramway.

And that's the whole irony of much of the Manchester Metrolink project. A significant amount of it's Manchester-Oldham-Rochdale route will run along old railway trackbeds, something it shares with the Manchester-Bury, Manchester-Altrincham (both self explanitory) and Manchester-St Werburgh's Road (which from Trafford Bar onwards follows the old Fallowfield loop and in the next 18 months will reach East Didsbury by branching off onto the long abandoned Cheshire Lines Committee route towards Stockport) proving perhaps that it would have been better to keep these lines open rather than now at great expence relaying and electrifying them 30, 40 or even 50 years later.