Buxton line

The Buxton line is a railway line in North West England, connecting Manchester and Stockport with Buxton in Derbyshire. Passenger services on the line are currently operated by Northern Trains.

The line has its origins with the Stockport, Disley and Whaley Bridge Railway, which the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) built to connect with the Cromford and High Peak Railway at Whaley Bridge. In 1863, it built an extension from Whaley Bridge to Buxton, via Chapel-en-le-Frith. This forestalled the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway's plans for the area, and also the Midland Railway's attempts to reach Manchester.

The latter two railways were forced to combine forces in a line following the LNWR, but north of it, through New Mills (part of what is now known as the Hope Valley Line), branching at Millers Dale. As a result, Buxton never achieved main line status, despite being one of the largest towns in the Peak District.

The LNWR had offered the use of the line but, with its climb through Dove Holes, the Midland did not consider it useful for express trains, saying that it went up a steep hill merely for the sake of going down. The LNWR may have saved costs in construction but it proved difficult to operate, even with the powerful locomotives they had been forced to introduce for their lines north of Manchester. In later days, a 17-mile (27 km) stretch was operated using banking engines, the longest such section on the British railway system.

From 8 October 1956, services on the line were in the hands of Class 104 diesel multiple units based at Buxton depot, though some remained steam worked for longer (for example, the 08:20 train to Manchester switched to diesel on 17 June 1957).

In 1957, there was a serious accident at Chapel-en-le-Frith in which driver John Axon died at his post attempting to control a runaway goods train; as a result, he received the George Cross medal posthumously.

The Beeching cuts threatened closure, but the line was reprieved at a hearing in 1964. In its 1964 accounts, British Rail counted the cost of the reprieve at £133,000 (£2.4m at 2014 prices) in a full year, plus £44,000 which could have been saved if freight was also withdrawn.

The line was electrified, at 25 kV AC overhead, between Manchester and Hazel Grove in 1981. A chord just south of Hazel Grove was built in 1986, allowing trains to change from the Hope Valley Line and thus faster running into Manchester Piccadilly. Colour light signalling, controlled from LNWR-built boxes at Edgeley Junction and Hazel Grove, cover the line as far as Norbury crossing, which itself has a small hut controlling two semaphore signals in the Middlewood area. Further south, signalling is mostly semaphore and is controlled from signal-boxes at Furness Vale, Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton.