Norton Bridge railway station

Norton Bridge railway station is four miles north-west of Stafford on the West Coast Main Line near the village of Norton Bridge in Staffordshire, England.The station was opened by the Grand Junction Railway in 1837.The main line platforms were removed before electrification in the 1960s. The island platform serving the Manchester via Stoke-on-Trent branch of the WCML has been out of use since 2004 when the footbridge was removed in order to improve freight clearances. The passenger train service was replaced by a bus service.From 2007, the Office of Rail Regulation no longer counted usage figures.The nearby junction between the Crewe and Stoke routes is an important one on the West Coast Main Line, as such during the 1960s modernisation of the line, the junction and some of the surrounding main lines were placed under the control of a new power signal box built to a similar design to that still standing at Wolverhampton. The Norton Bridge signal box was notable for its use of an experimental Westinghouse solid-state interlocking system for some years, later being converted to a conventional relay-based interlocking; this signal box features briefly in the British Transport Films production "Thirty Million Letters". It closed altogether in 2004, control passing instead to the signal control centre at Stoke, although the lower storey still remains in situ as a relay room.