Interesting question. I have a copy of the LMR Passenger Timetable for the period 13 June11 September 1960, which would cover the last summer before Mayfield closed to passengers on 28 August 1960.
This was the time when Manchester London Road was being electrified and re-built as Piccadilly, so a good fraction of trains which had previously run into London Road were diverted to Mayfield as a short-term measure. So what's written below is not typical of Mayfield in most of the post-WWII period.
The services which generally used Mayfield in 1960 were local trains on these routes:
- Buxton via Stockport.
- Local trains to Wilmslow, Alderley Edge or Crewe, via either Styal or Stockport.
- Local trains to Macclesfield or Stoke-on-Trent via Stockport.
Confusingly, there was no hard-and-fast rule, so if you were a traveller to Wilmslow, for example, most of your trains would depart from Mayfield during this period, but a significant minority would still be timetabled to start from a platform at London Road. To add fuel to the fire, a good proportion of trains seemed to switch between Mayfield and London Road, or vice versa depending whether it was Monday-Friday or Saturday. Again with no way for the casual passenger to predict which.
There was no clock-face departure pattern for suburban trains back then, but as a rule of thumb there were typically 3 or 4 trains per hour in the mid-day off-peak spread between the local routes listed above.
Mayfield was busier in the SX peak period. Heres a list of departures from the 1960 timetable:
1700 Wilmslow via Styal
1715 Crewe via Stockport
1720 Stoke-on-Trent
1727 Stockport.
1730 Chelford via Stockport
1737 Buxton limited stops.
1740 Macclesfield Hibel Road.
1750 Buxton all stations
1810 Alderley Edge via Stockport
1812 Wilmslow via Styal
1832 Crewe via Stockport
Last local services at night were:-
2215 SO stations to Stoke-on-Trent
2250 SX stations to Buxton
The very last train at night (7 nights a week) was, surprisingly, an overnight train carrying sleeping cars - the 2355 Manchester Mayfield portion of a Manchester/Liverpool to Cardiff sleeper.
First train in the morning was the Manchester portion of the previous days 1650 Penzance to Liverpool/Manchester, due into Mayfield at 0617 and also conveying sleeping cars from Plymouth.
On Sundays, such local trains as were running were all timetabled from London Road, but just to stop passengers getting complacent (especially those carrying heavy luggage), there was a single 1555 departure to Bristol which ran from Mayfield, plus the daily 2355 to Cardiff.
I have older timetables which I could dig out to check Mayfield's "normal" services before the Piccadilly re-build. This would be time-consuming, since the older a railway timetable is, the harder it usually is to read and interpret correctly.