Can anyone explain the real (historical) significance of Crossens as terminus of a relatively intensive suburban train service in a modestly sized town?
Although the Lancashire & Yorkshire’s Liverpool Exchange-Southport-Crossens electrification is nowadays seen as quite pioneering, in many ways it was actually quite late to the Merseyside/Lancashire party.
The Liverpool Overhead Railway has opened as an electric line in 1893. Birkenhead had been a pioneer with trams and electrified around 1901. Liverpool had electrified its trams around 1898-1901. The Mersey Railway was electrified in 1903.
Southport Corporation Tramways had really got going with electric traction from 1900. The Corporation had its own power station near Blowick (in a complex with the town’s gas works, tram depot and refuse destructor). The seven routes formed a fairly tight network. This included passing Chapel Street, St Luke’s, Meols Cop, and Churchtown and indeed closer to the actual Hesketh Park than the eponymous station (and very close to Blowick).
Besides systems which had already been electrified there were other electric vultures circling. The Ormskirk & Southport Light Railway had gained its act for a new electric route in 1900. Another interurban tram route had been authorised in 1900 to run from Southport to Lytham St Annes (with a transporter bridge across the Ribble Estuary). Neither of the lines were built.
Where electrified competition existed – from the Overhead, Liverpool trams and Southport trams – the L&Y lost traffic and had to make a response. Hence the scheme as built and completed in 1904. It is unclear to me how much traffic the electrification ‘rescued’, at least in the urban areas, although it obviously boosted longer distance commuting between the Southport area and Liverpool.
So far as I am aware, before the electrification the local stations between Southport and Crossens were only served by through Southport-Preston trains. There were no short workings between Southport and Crossens (although the odd local train did just run between Southport and Banks, just beyond Crossens on Sundays).
When electrification came in there was a major ramp-up in services to Crossens. There were three stopping services per hour between Liverpool Exchange and Crossens (reversing at Southport) plus an hourly ‘express’ service from Exchange, taking advantage of the quadruple track on the way to Seaforth & Litherland to overtake, that ran to Southport and then local to Crossens. It is not clear that the express services were especially successful as they ended with the First World War.
Things changed with the building of Meols Cop works in 1913, when diversion of the Crossens service via Meols Cop, with a rapid reversal, became routine.
Crossens had remained a fairly small rural village outside the Southport boundary, with the station still almost entirely surround by fields but around 1906 became the home of the Vulcan Motor Works, just opposite the station. There would undoubtedly have been worker traffic as there was no Southport Corporation transport out that far in the tram era. Despite playing a valuable role through two world wars in making many military vehicles the factory declined rapidly into the 1950s. The local electric shuttle was thinned out significantly in this period, especially in the evenings but ironically did recover to around half-hourly before closure.
All the photographs that I’ve ever seen of Crossens (and other local stations between there and Southport) have been remarkably bereft of any actual passengers. Whilst there may well have been little marginal cost of operating the local service, it is far from clear that there was much revenue either. Crossens was only three miles from Southport, so hardly a difficult bus trip, bicycle ride or even a walk for many people. Fares were low and yet quite expensive to sell and collect with conventional heavy rail methods of operation. And by the 1960s a great deal of electrical infrastructure was 50-60 years old.
How could such an operation still be profitable into the 1960s?
