EPW017438 ENGLAND (1927). Moor Road, the Stockport Timperley and Altrincham Junction railway and surrounding countryside, Baguley, 1927

Just possibly ex-LNWR 0-8-0s, unusual for such an apparently short goods train, but on one of the most intensively used stretches of line in the North West,

...hauling a load of coal from the yorkshire coalfields perhaps? I can't actually work out where this location is so I can't tell if the train is eastbound or westbound!

Westbound, towards Warrington and Liverpool ...

In the sixties Sandy Lane was a through road that joined Altrincham Road at a point somewhere near Moor Road.I recall Robert Walker haulage company now based at Woodley stored their vehicles on land that is now used by Wythenshawe Town F C. The vehicles were parked on open land without a security guard in sight.how times have changed.

The junction of Sandy Lane with Altrincham Road is just at the point where I put the marker "peg" for "Sandy Lane" on the photograph. You can see an aerial view of the whole of Sandy Lane on other photographs on this website taken on the same flight, e.g. image reference nos. EPW017411 and EPW017424.



You've "broken a memory" for me: I still see Robert Walker's vehicles round and about, and each time I recall that long ago their lorries used to have "WYTHENSHAWE, MANCHESTER" on the doors and that this was later changed to "WOODLEY, CHESHIRE". But I'd entirely forgotten that they used to use the old market garden fields on Sandy Lane as a sort of depot and parking ground, and that was where I used to see them.



I can just remember the cottages on Sandy Lane, standing empty and semi-derelict; that would have been in the mid-1950s, I think. They were demolished, but for some years afterwards some of the fields remained pretty untouched, uncultivated but with their hawthorn dividing hedges still growing untrimmed. I seem to remember that Timpson Shoes built a large warehouse at the Southmoor Road which obliterated the old course of Sandy Lane and all the fields at its eastern end; but the western end near Butcher Lane remained as it had been, semi-rural but overgrown, well into the 1960s. I can remember sunbathing in one of the fields and, apart from the odd train and the distant hum of cars on Altrincham Road, all you could hear were birds twittering and the sound of wind in the grass!

Recently passing this way for the first time in quite a while, I noticed that the old congregational church now seems to have vanished, along with the nearby last remaining traces of the former junction of Floats Road with Altrincham Road.