Halton’s survival story

Opened by London and North Western Railway in 1873, the Halton Curve was built as a shorter and quicker route for freight between the mineral-producing regions of North Wales and the industrial powerhouse of South Lancashire.

Some passenger services ran between Chester and Liverpool Lime Street, offering an alternative to the existing line to Birkenhead (where river ferries were required to cross the Mersey prior to the opening of the Mersey Railway Tunnel in 1886).

Closure was first proposed by Beeching in the 1960s, amid declining freight traffic and passenger numbers. And the link was almost abandoned in the early 1970s, to eliminate the financial cost of spanning the newly constructed M56 motorway.

The last regular passenger services were withdrawn in May 1975. Chester to Liverpool trains were concentrated on the Merseyrail network’s Wirral Line via Birkenhead, which opened in its current form in 1977.

The Halton Curve remained a useful diversionary route, and throughout the 1980s a Saturday-only service ran between Llandudno and Liverpool, in addition to the occasional freight and charter special.

In 1994 Railtrack singled the route, and the speed limit was reduced to 40mph to reduce maintenance and track renewal costs. Vital crossings and points were removed at Halton Junction in order to increase line speeds on the West Coast Main Line between Liverpool and Crewe. This left the line accessible only to northbound services joining the line at its southern point (Frodsham Junction).

In more recent years, a single parliamentary train has run on Saturdays during summer months only. Normally operated by a Class 150 or ‘153’, Northern Rail’s 0753 Chester-Runcorn became popular with photographers and enthusiasts due to the rarity of sighting traffic on the line.

In 2004 the Strategic Rail Authority made a final bid for full closure, in order to remove the cost of including Halton Junction in the signalling upgrade of the WCML in the Runcorn area. Plans were shelved and a minimum service maintained to avoid the cumbersome and expensive administrative process of formally closing the line.