When I take visitors in to Liverpool, sometimes I drive them in down the Dock Road from Bootle to the centre, to give them a taste of industrial dereliction, abandoned docks, piles of scrap metal and vegetable oil processing factories. This is the route of the old LOR. Further south after Queen's Dock and Brunswick Dock there's only the Festival Gardens really. The LOR only ran as far as Dingle and Herculaneum Dock, never to Garston.
The only section where you would now get sufficient passenger traffic on a rebuilt LOR would be perhaps one mile north and south of the Pier Head. Very few people now live close to the waterfront - most of them are far closer to the Northern Line stations, or to the line out from Central to Hunts Cross.
In 1947 about 80,000 men worked on the docks. Now, although Liverpool is handling a heavier tonnage of freight than ever before, the workforce is a small fraction of its previous figure.
Better to spend some of £100 million (which we don't have!) removing the buffer stops at Ormskirk and Kirkby, giving Skelmersdale a proper station, and electrifying through to Preston, Wigan and Southport via Ormskirk and the Burscough curve.
Strange how the partial third-rail electrification, halting originally at Ormskirk, Hooton, Bidston and Kirkby, actually cut Liverpool off from much of its hinterland in rail terms - the old fast L&Y lines to Preston, Blackburn and Burnley, and Scotland; the L&Y fast route to Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale and Yorkshire, any trains to North Wales, Wrexham and the Marches.
The only fast lines out of Liverpool left were those to larger cities - Manchester, London and Birmingham. Apart from these, Liverpool became a trundling emu backwater, stopping all stations. The Halton curve and electrification to St Helens and Wigan has begun the reversal of this: it needs to continue further.
