woodenhead

I've just dug out some old photos I took of Fallowfield station after the track was lifted - there were piles of wooden sleepers scattered about - I guess that answers the question.

The pics aren't very good, not worth posting, I should have gone out with a camera when there was track, maybe even trains lol.

SPD Ltd (Speedy Prompt Delivery) was the distribution arm of Van den Burghs and a division of Unilever.  They had a number of sites around the country and, I think,  usually had a rail connection. Van den Burghs had a large factory at Port Sunlight and did a lot of distribution by rail. The SPD depots did local deliveries by road after receiving the main consignments from BR. They seem to have picked some unfortunate sites that seemed to suffer from the adjacent railway suffering closure. This was certainly the case at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Plodder Lane in Bolton and, indeed, your site at Wilbraham Road.

The line outlived their railway connection by at least 20 years, I think they shut the actual depot in the 1980s, a decade or more after they lost the rail connection.