Description
The station has three platforms which if not unusual enough, have each their own entrance and exit. Platforms 1 and 2 (which was once an island platform) are accessed by separate flights of stairs from the road over bridge which crosses the line to the west of the station. Platform 3 is accessed from the same road by a bridge across the nearby canal. Only platform 3 (which was built on the former Up Goods Loop in the mid 1980s) has step-free access to the street. Other than simple shelters on the platforms, there are no station buildings and the station is unmanned. The station did have two additional platforms up until the mid-1960s (the current platform 2 having an outer face, with the fourth side platform standing where platform 3 is now) when the line was quadruple all the way from Huddersfield to Diggle Junction, but these were decommissioned when the main line was reduced to two tracks in 1966. The station managed to avoid closure in the wake of the 1968 cutbacks that claimed many others on this section of route, but for some years acted as the terminus for local stopping trains from the Leeds direction (hence the provision of signalling that allows trains to start back east from platforms 2 & 3) and had no regular service towards Stalybridge and Manchester.
The station is situated about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) to the east of the entrance to the Standedge rail and canal tunnels. The tunnel entrance, with its exhibition and boat trips, can easily be reached by walking along the towpath of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, which runs adjacent to the station. The station's former goods yard is now the headquarters of the National Trust's Marsden Moor Estate, and the goods shed contains a public exhibition, Welcome to Marsden, which gives an overview of the area and its transport history.
There was formerly another area of sidings situated to the south of the railway and canal, to the west of the station, which was originally built to accommodate the heavy traffic generated during the building of the reservoirs in the nearby Wessenden Valley. The steeply graded Huddersfield Corporation Waterworks Railway connected these sidings to the reservoir works. The area is now a heavily wooded country park, but an abutment of the long demolished bridge by which the waterworks railway crossed the River Colne can still be found amongst the vegetation.
Read more about this topic: Marsden Railway Station
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