Walkden railway station

Walkden railway station serves the town of Walkden in City of Salford, Greater Manchester, England on the Manchester to Southport Line. The station is located 8+1⁄4 miles (13.3 km) north-west of Manchester with regular Northern Trains services to these towns as well as the city of Salford, Swinton and Hindley. It was opened by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. One of the busier stations on the line, the station used to be known as Walkden High Level to differentiate it from the London and North Western Railway's Walkden Low Level railway station (on the line from Manchester Exchange to Bolton Great Moor Street, which was closed to passengers in 1954). It controlled a junction for the goods line to Ellesmere Colliery. First opened in 1888 with the line, it has only ever had two platform faces - when the line was quadrupled at the turn of the century, the two additional tracks were laid to the south and were not provided with platforms. The fast lines were subsequently decommissioned in November 1965 and lifted. In February 2007 the Friends of Walkden Station community volunteer group was founded to campaign for improvements to the station's facilities and services. One of the line's two remaining signal boxes was formerly located here (it acted as the 'fringe' box to Manchester Piccadilly signalling centre), but it and neighbouring Atherton Goods Yard box were both closed in the spring of 2013 and their semaphore signals replaced by colour lights worked from Piccadilly SCC.