No that's from when the station was last officially worked on when it was an working station, it's how they did things for a while when they stopped making them fully out of brick and stone. It's the same at Cadishead and West Timperley to name but a few, lots of later station platforms were done in this way.
Here's a pic of Cadishead:
Yes, I'll have to make it a really early start, get out and about for around about 9am, otherwise I'll lose too much daylight, plus there's a few other things I want to have a look at long the line, such as the tunnel entrance from the current line at Stalybridge that goes onto the disused line. If you look at this pic below, you can see the opening in the green bit just above.... obviously I'm not* going to go down into it, but I do want to get a few snaps from above.... though I may lower my camera and see if that'll work!
If you go to the map and look by the river, you can see a footbridge going across, that marks the line that the viaduct took over the river, I've circled the barely visible brickwork sticking out of the 3D Maps pic:
About half the length of the current active line tunnel. Though I have to say, the inside of this tunnel ain't half bad!
