Notes: Helsby & Alvanley Station was situated on the Cheshire Lines Committee’s (CLC) Mouldsworth to Helsby Junction railway which opened on the 1 September 1869. Mouldsworth was located on the CLC Manchester to Chester line. The CLC was jointly owned by the Great Northern Railway (GNR), the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (MSLR) and the Midland Railway (MR) and the purpose of the line was to provide them with access to the Birkenhead Dock system via the Birkenhead Joint Railway (BJR) which had a line that ran from Helsby to Birkenhead.

The line was primarily constructed for goods services but a passenger station was opened at Helsby on the 22 June 1870. As the BJR already had a station called Helsby the CLC named theirs Helsby and Alvanley.

The line was a single track branch so the station was provided with one platform which was located on the east side of the track. It had a two storey brick built building which housed all of the usual station facilities and also had living accommodation for the station master. The first service on the line did not prove to be very

From October 1936 the station re-opened for intermittent use by workmen’s services which operated until the 22 May 1944 after which the station closed once again. The timetable for 1943 had one arrival in the morning which had departed from Hooton at 7.20am, followed by an evening departure that went back to Hooton and departed from Helsby & Alvanley at 6.00pm.

On the 1 January 1948 Helsby & Alvanley Station became part of the nationalised British Railways (London Midland Region). A steady stream of goods services continued to pass through the station. The line gained extra traffic with the opening of a large oil refinery at Stanlow a short distance to the north.

On the 9 September 1963 at a time when stations throughout Britain were closing in their hundreds Helsby & Alvanley re-opened as a passenger station with one train per day leaving at 5.30pm for Rock Ferry. The service lasted only a few months and on the 2 January 1964 the station closed for good to passenger services. It served goods services for a few more months closing completely on the 2 March 1964.

Interestingly the station never appeared as a passenger facility on an Ordinance Survey Map in the 20th Century.

The line remained busy until 1990 by which time the oil industry had built numerous pipelines from the Stanlow Refinery. The commissioning of the pipelines led to a dramatic drop in the number of freight trains running to and from Stanlow and the Mouldsworth to Helsby Junction line was closed on 14 September 1991. The track remained in situ for a number of years but it was eventually lifted.

The station had passed into private ownership after closure and was still in use as a private residence in 2011.

Ticket from Michael Stewart.

Sources:

• The Cheshire Lines Committee, by P Bolger, 1984, Heyday Publishing Company.
• Lost Stations of North West England, by P T Wright, 2011, Silver Link Publishing.

See also Manley Station