The Middleton Junction and Oldham Branch Railway was built so as to open on March 31, 1842 by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company whose chief engineer was the world famous engineer George Stephenson. It was a railway line which came off the Manchester to Littleborough railway line, built on July 4, 1839, at Middleton Junction (then Oldham Junction ) went through the new town of Chadderton to Oldham Werneth .

The railway did not prosper in its first few years and plans were quickly made for the railway line to come nearer the town centre of Oldham. First trains to use this line found the hill too much and a pulley had to be installed at Werneth station for help. The railway line grew as Chadderton and Oldham became one of the biggest textile centres in the world, as well as the numerous Collieries which littered the surrounding countryside around the town of Chadderton. On November 1847 saw the opening of Oldham Central Station and the line extended from Werneth to Oldham Mumps and Oldham Junction was renamed Middleton Junction. The railway system around Oldham was completed when the line to Rochdale from Mumps opened on August 12, 1863, and the branch to Royton was completed on March 21, 1864.

As the town boomed so did the track, with multiple lines being added to its existing one. At one time it led to all of Oldham's five railway stations: Werneth, Clegg Street, Mumps, Central and Glodwick Road, as well as linking stations at Lees, Derker and Royton. By the 1930s with new transportation links linked the nearby highway called Broadway (A663), the significance of the line dropped. As the textile mills and Collieries closed around it the line became ever more barren as it wasn't the main route anymore, the current Oldham to Manchester Railway line took most of the traffic.

With the nationalisation of the railways and then the following Beechings' Report , the line was set to close. The line was closed to all passenger traffic in 1960, and on January 1, 1963 was formally closed. Oldham Central Station closed in the later in the 1960's. Soon after on March 13, 1964 saw the pulling up and scrapping of the rails and other railway goods on the Middleton Junction and Oldham Branch Railway. Over the years the rest of the line which went to the Chadderton Coal and Goods Depot was closed and scrapped, and the countryside slowly took over. Over 40 years later the landscape has irreversibly changed back to farmland apart from one tiny area where you can see where the old line went into an embankment with the old Johnny Whitehead Bridge still as a crossing point for ramblers.