For more than a century pretty much the only way of getting between Manchester's two main railway stations was on foot. Piccadilly and Victoria might have been two of the busiest stations in the North of England - but for a long time it was impossible to catch a train from one to the other.
The bizarre situation was a hangover from the Wild West of Victorian railway mania, when hugely powerful companies competed to build tracks across the country, without any thought for how the network might join up. But those petty rivalries left Manchester with a headache that town planners and rail chiefs are still trying to cure almost two centuries later.
Read more:
As any train buff worth their salt knows Manchester was home to the world's first inter-city railway. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, designed and built by George Stephenson, opened in 1830 and revolutionised Britain.
But while Liverpool Road, which still stands as part of the Science and Industry Museum, may have been the world's first railway station, it was also one of the first stations to close, as the line was quickly overtaken in the boom of the following decade.
Piccadilly first opened as Store Street in 1842, before being renamed Manchester London Road five years later. Built by the Manchester and Birmingham Railway company, it served trains between the two cities and on to London and the south.
Two years later and around a mile to the north, Victoria station was opened by the Manchester and Leeds Railway company. Originally the line terminated at a station called Manchester Oldham Road in Collyhurst, but realising the advantages of joining the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, creating a through route from Yorkshire, bosses set about building a joint station in the city centre.
Over the next few years and decades the warring companies would undergo several mergers and name changes, but crucially remained deeply suspicious of each other, thwarting any attempts to connect the two stations. And that rivalry would have huge consequences for Manchester.
"The Victorian approach to railway building was laissez-faire, it was a bit like the Wild West," said Paul Williams, from the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester. "The railway companies were immensely profitable and had very influential friends and backers. At the time there was never any thought of a national network.
"It was simply a case of getting trains from point A to point B and no-one gave any thought to the ramifications of that. And for a long time the two companies involved saw no benefit in connecting Victoria and Piccadilly.
"As time went on the benefits of doing so became clear, but by that point it was too late. Manchester was built up, it would have cost a lot of money, even then, to build a line."
The disconnect created a huge blockage of railway traffic across the north. It meant for example a passenger in Altrincham trying to get to Huddersfield, had to get off at Piccadilly and trek across town. A family from Rochdale travelling to Birmingham needed to change at Victoria before catching another train at Piccadilly.
And it also had an fascinating impact on the geography and economy of Manchester. Companies on the north side of the city centre such as the Co-op tended to draw the bulk of their workforce from the suburbs and towns to the north, such as Rochdale, Bury and Bolton.
That was because the only city centre station served by those areas was Victoria and travelling across town to work was too difficult or time consuming. A similar situation sprung up round Piccadilly, where businesses there tended to draw most of their staff from the southern suburbs.
Until 1974 you couldn't even catch a bus between Piccadilly and Victoria, as a powerful taxi lobby who feared the loss of a lucrative source of income, blocked any attempts to introduce a service. And while it was difficult for passengers, it also had major implications for the train companies.
To transport an engine from Victoria to Piccadilly meant taking a circuitous seven mile trip via Miles Platting and Ardwick. In practice that was too impractical, so each station was forced, at significant expense, to have its own washing and repair facilities.
Manchester is by no means the only British city where this is the case. Glasgow and Birmingham still have similar, but less aggravating complications.
But Manchester is probably the most extreme example of it - and it's the only place that has made serious attempts to solve the problem. One early workaround was the opening of the Stockport to Stalybridge line, now infamous for its twice weekly 'ghost trains'.
That allowed passengers travelling from West Yorkshire to the south via Manchester, to take a shortcut from Stalybridge to Stockport, thus avoiding the problems of getting from Victoria to Piccadilly. Plans for a tunnel connecting the Piccadilly and Victoria were first floated in the 1920s, and again, more seriously in 1972, when the Picc-Vicc underground line was proposed.
Back then, work got as far as exploratory excavations. To this day, some 30ft beneath the old Top Shop in the Arndale centre, the beginnings of a station at the heart of the 2.3 mile-long line still exist.
Picc-Vicc would have cost £9,271,300 – equivalent to about £80m today. But it was shelved by transport minister John Peyton after the government announced £500m of spending cuts.
A breakthrough came in 1988 when British Rail opened the Windsor Link, a 700m stretch of track connecting Salford Crescent and Deansgate stations. It meant for the first time passengers from Wigan, Bolton and further afield to the north west could catch a direct train to Piccadilly.
Four years later the Metrolink opened, connecting the two stations for the first time. It was a vast improvement and ushered in a new era of public transport in Greater Manchester, but it still didn't solve the problem of passengers having to change trains.
That would come 25 years later with the opening of the Ordsall Chord. The £85m line, symbolised by the rusty asymmetrical bridge over the River Irwell, connected Piccadilly and Victoria for the first time in 173 years.
Again it's still far from perfect and there are major issues with congestion on the line which will see just one train a hour running through it in 2023. But it's hoped the Ordsall Chord will eventually have a major impact on public transport in Manchester.
"People don't like changing trains, they like to stay on the same train all the way to their destination," said Paul Williams. The Ordsall Chord is a huge help in doing that. It could mean that you could catch a direct train from Rochdale to Manchester Airport for the first time, or from Altrincham to Huddersfield for example.
"And by making it easier for people, it means they're much more likely to leave the car at home and catch the train.
"But the problem is capacity through Deansgate into Piccadilly. There are trains from half of England crammed into a two line section of track through there. Several solutions have been put forward, all are indecently expensive.
"And it's all a legacy of petty rivalries from the 1840s."
With thanks to the Museum of Transport, Greater Transport for their assistance with this article.
The museum, on Boyle Street in Cheetham Hill, is open Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4.30pm.
READ NEXT:
