Traveling Round

The station at Gatley was opened on the 1st of May 1909. The first ticket was bought by the Reverend Bruster. The men who built the station had to lodge in the village. They had to cut the railway through the playing fields to Heald Green and Wilmslow.

Gatley station was a busy place, the passengers to Manchester would come from as far away as Cheadle on foot as there were no buses. There was a station master and two porters. Vegetables, newspapers, fish etc. had to come by rail. The porters had to walk along the line as far as Gatley Golf Club to put lamps in the signal boxes, then down to the viaducts on the way to Manchester for the ones there!

There was a newspaper shop on the platform selling sweets, chocolates etc.. The firm was called Wymans, they had most of the station. The Mancunian Express would go through Gatley every day at ten o'clock at about 70miles per hour. It left London Road station in Manchester at 0955 and arrived at Euston at 1300. Then at nine-thirty in the evening The Pines Express came back. Now the line is electrified, the passengers all go by bus or by their own cars! The station master was named J.S.Smith and he lived in the cottages in Church Road.

One of the quickest parcel delivery services in Cheadle and Gatley was run by the Corporation. You could ring up any shop in Manchester or Stockport before 10 am and your parcel would be delivered at around 2 or 3 in the afternoon to any house in the area.

To get to Altrincham, to go to school or to do some shopping, you had to go to Northenden station. The train would come from Tiviot Dale station in Stockport, that was the Cheshire Lines railway from Stockport to Altrincham.. There were about four trains a day.
Stockport Corporation trams started running to Gatley in about 1904, just before I was born. Before that there was "Scotty Bob's" horse bus. His real name was James Telford and he drove his horse bus between Gatley and Manchester for about 50 years. He died in around 1929. The trams used to turn round at the Horse and Farrier.
The fare to Reddish was 4d. They were open on top and ran about every 20 minutes. They would carry bundles of newspapers and parcels for shops on the way. The first electricity to come to Gatley was fed through the overhead tram wires. It powered a little workshop in the village. The trams stopped before the Second World War and after that we had the No. 40 bus..

There was a wheelrights behind St.James' Church in an old mill. They made vans and cabs and boasted that they could turn a model T Ford into a lorry in five minutes!! They would take the back off and put a flat bed onto the chassis. The place was later used for making batteries and then eventually pulled down. The new Church Hall and Homebeck House are now on that site.