Rush Hour Trains at: Crewe, WCML, 02/04/26

A superb evening session spent at Crewe on the West Coast Mainline where we see plenty of services from Avanti West Coast, London Northwestern Railway, East Midlands Railway, Transport For Wales, Northern, Cross Country and freight from Freightliner.

The station was opened in 1837 by the Grand Junction Railway. The whole idea of this station was to connect the four largest cities in England by joining the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to the projected London and Birmingham Railway.

There were massive plans for the railway and the station when it first opened. As soon as the station was built there were plans to build at the time a branch line that would head to Chester. The line now being a pretty busy route for passenger traffic. Oddly enough the company created to build this route was called and Chester and Crewe Railway. But once the line had been completed they were merged with the Grand Junction Railway in 1840.

Because at the time the steam engines were only small it meant that an engine shed was built was built that was used to stable banking engines that would be used to push trains up a small incline that today would be no match at all.

Less than a year later plans were created for a trunk route to be built linking Crewe to Holyhead which also gave great access to Ireland which in turn started to cement itself as an important junction station in the UK.

The next line to meet was the line from Manchester. There were plans to have the line run straight from Manchester to Birmingham but when construction was underway it was deemed that it would be uneconomical because of the length of the line that they wanted to create. So it was decided that they would connect their line to the GJR at Crewe.

The town started to grow in size when the GJR moved their depot from Edge Hill in Liverpool to the North of the station. It was done in order to house the workforce.

In 1846 the GJR and the London and Birmingham Railway merged together to form at the time the largest company in the world which is the London & Northwestern Railway.

When the company came to be they started the largest amount of track laying seen in the country. They extended lines and built new ones heading to: Holyhead, Lancaster and Carlisle, Leeds, Shrewsbury, Stoke-on-Trent and the South of Wales.

With all the lines converging on the West Coast Mainline at Crewe it meant that more traffic was coming through the station roughly 1000 trains during any 24 hour period which mostly consisted of freight there were plans brought up which would take the trains under the station.

By 1903 the station was given a make over to allow stopping freight traffic to unload for road vehicles which meant that 9 through platforms were constructed each were a 1/4 mile in length. The total cost of the improvement at the time was £1,000,000 which in today's money is the equivalent to £97,080,000. I'll take a portion of that quite happily.

When the LMS was created Crewe continued to grow in size, locomotives were still being built on a daily basis and the signalling was given a complete overhaul. The two former signal boxes were instead made into concrete fortresses to withstand air raids. But aside from that nothing else really took place in the 50 years LMS were running around.

It wasn't until British Railways was formed that further changes were taking place around the station. Most notably was when steam was starting to be raise out and replaced with diesel and electric locomotives and multiple units which meant that the works were starting to close down because of lack of work and the fact that smaller depots were starting to pop up across the country that would task care of the trains.

Although as we all know Crewe works survived to an extent for the heritage centre and the actual works itself for restoring steam engines.

Much more work was taken out from then to the present day to incorporate the electrification of the WCML, bigger trains, better facilities to make it the station we all know and love today.

My next rush hour film will be from London Kings Cross.

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