[1][page needed] The people of the town, along with several mines on the Cheadle Coalfield, wanted a rail connection as a means of transporting their goods.

In the meantime, the owners of Foxfield Colliery at Dilhorne had grown tired of waiting for the new line and had built their own connection to the NSR near Blythe Bridge.

[1][page needed] After the NSR was absorbed into the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923, problems with the tunnel became even more commonplace and construction of a new deviation line finally began in 1932.

[2] The tunnel portals were bricked up and the track from the south was lifted soon after, but the northern section of the old line remained in use as a backshunt to New Haden Colliery; all trains to and from the latter would thus need to reverse at Cheadle.

[1][page needed] In a further blow, New Haden Colliery was closed in 1943 after the Ministry of Fuel and Power decided to move the 500 miners to more efficient pits in aid of the war effort, and its traffic of 3,000 tons per week was lost.

However, a brickworks adjacent to the colliery plus an increasing amount of sand traffic from nearby quarries, most of it delivered by road to Cheadle, provided a lifeline.

[1][page needed] Tean station closed under British Railways on 1 June 1953; by that time it had been reduced in status to an unstaffed halt.

Diesel multiple units started to replace steam traction in 1958 when they were introduced on the Loop Line services, but this did little to stem the decline in passenger numbers.

[6][page needed] The Cheadle branch was chosen by InterCity to show the versatility of the charter service by running on an out of use railway for part of the journey.

Today, most of the alignment is heavily overgrown but still free from development, except for the final quarter of a mile into Cheadle which was lifted in the summer of 1991 and early 1992 to make way for a new housing estate.