Disused Stations
Lost Temini of
NORTH WEST ENGLAND
Paul Wright
The steady trickle of railway closures increased in the 1950’s turning into a torrent in the 1960’s with the rationalization of our railway network under the infamous Dr. Richard Beeching, the chairman of British Railways from 1961 - 1965.
In March 1963 his report “The reshaping of British Railways” was published. The “Beeching Axe” as it became known proposed a massive closure programme. He recommended the closure of one third of Britain’s 18,000 mile railway network, mainly rural branches and cross country lines and 2,128 stations on lines that were to be kept open. The following year his second report “The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes” was even more scathing with a proposal that all lines should be closed apart from the major intercity routes and important profit making commuter lines around the big cities leaving Britain with little more than a skeleton railway system and a large parts of the country entirely devoid of railways. The report was rejected by the government and Dr. Beeching resigned in 1965.
Although Beeching was gone, the closure programme that he started under the Conservatives in the early 1960’s continued unabated under Labour until it was brought to a halt in the early 1970’s; but by that time the damage had been done. In 1955 the British railway system had 20,000 miles of track and 6,000 stations. By 1975 this had shrunk to 12,000 miles of track and 2,000 stations, roughly the same size it is today.
Gradually the memory of these lost lines and stations began to fade as the urban sites were redeveloped with only a road name to remind people of their former existence. Most of the rural sites were returned to nature and agriculture although many of the stations still survive in some form or another, some transformed into attractive country dwellings while others linger on in the undergrowth abandoned and forgotten.
In 2005 Nick Catford a member of Subterranea Britannica started the Disused Stations Website with the aim of creating a definitive database of the UKs closed stations that would be available free to all. The work to complete the database is still ongoing and will take many years to complete. To date there are 1300 stations on the site and it is visited by thousands of people every week.
This book is intended to act as a companion to the Disused Stations Website. It follows roughly the same format but as a book it should appeal to those who want to have something tangible to put on their bookshelf and it should also appeal to those who want to go out and visit the sites of the stations as it can be used as a guide book. With so many stations now on the Website it was difficult to decide which stations would should be included in this book. The idea of selecting terminus stations from the North West, an area steeped in railway history seemed like a good point to start. In this book they are ordered by the year of opening. I felt that this would be a good way of showing how the network developed, expanded and eventually contracted.
238 x 172mm 128pp c200 colour illustrations plus map
978 1 85794 316 0 Paperback £19.99
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