Liverpool Road Station, the first and always my favourite

Of all the stations this one is my favourite.  

It was opened in 1830 and closed to passenger traffic just 14 years later, a victim of its own success.   It is a place I return to regularly and one that I have already written about. *

So I don’t intend to go into its history right now.  But it is a place to visit, and standing in the carriage shed built in 1831 you get a sense of just how important the place is in the history of our railways.

Its roof would not have been out of place in a medieval barn with its wooden beams supported on cast iron pillars, and substitute the iron for wood posts and it could be any building across a thousand years.  But in the distance is the sweeping curve of the roof of Central Station all glass and iron gracefully rising 27 meters from the platform floor.

Here then are the beginnings of our railway architecture and its high point separated by just 50 years.  It was an uncertain beginning with the railway company unsure as to whether to have locomotives to haul the passengers and wagons or rely on static steam engines placed along the route which would use steam powered capstans and cables.

Even the station buildings are a compromise.  The station master’s house on the corner of Liverpool Road and Water Street had been the home of a local industrialist and the booking halls had been designed to imitate the fine homes of the wealthy.

Not so Central Station which originally was to have a grand set of railway offices and a hotel at the front of the place, or the even more ornate and impressive sweep of the redesigned Victoria Station.

Tomorrow; how do you design and build for storing goods at the first proper railway complex in the world?

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/castlefield-story-part-five-coming-of.html 

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson