Stone railway station

Stone railway station serves the market town of Stone, Staffordshire, England. The station is located on a junction of the Colwich to Manchester spur of the West Coast Main Line, but has platforms only on the branch from Stafford to Stoke-on-Trent.

History
There have been two stations at Stone and both were opened by the North Staffordshire Railway. The first opened on 17 April 1848 and was next to the Newcastle Road bridge. With the opening of the Colwich line on 1 May 1849, the original station was closed and replaced the same day by the current station. The station was renamed Stone Junction in January 1888, but reverted to the original name Stone at some point between 1923 and 1947. The Colwich platforms were closed in 1947 and subsequently removed.

The station building has been redeveloped by Stone Town Council as a community centre.

APTIS ticketing here ceased in 1993, when the station became unstaffed.

Service withdrawal and reinstatement
In 2004, rail services were withdrawn from the station and were replaced by buses, operated by BakerBus; this was initially whilst upgrade work was carried out on the Stafford and Colwich to Cheadle Hulme lines. However, the former Stafford to Stoke local service, that formerly called here, was never reinstated once the work was completed (the units used on it being redeployed in the West Midlands) and so the rail replacement service continued (the Trent Valley local service between Stafford and Coventry also suffered the same fate).

Virgin CrossCountry were reportedly going to reinstate Stone as a stop from June 2006 on the Birmingham to Manchester service, but this never materialised.

However, in December 2008, Stone station reopened for an hourly train service between Crewe and London Euston, as part of a new revamped West Coast Main Line timetable unveiled by the Department for Transport. This service was operated by London Midland, then London Northwestern Railway, until its withdrawal.

Services
Stone is currently served by the hourly London Northwestern Railway services between and Crewe via Alsager, Kidsgrove, Longport and. Trains operated by CrossCountry do not currently call at Stone.

The new West Midlands franchise saw the former Euston to Crewe trains replaced by a new Birmingham–Wolverhampton–Stoke–Crewe service that stopped here. The London service was changed to one via Birmingham, despite opposition against losing a direct link to London. The Birmingham service was cut back in December 2023 to start at Stafford, with Stone losing its direct links to Birmingham and Wolverhampton.