Borderlands Line

Borderlands line

Legend Wirral Line Bidston Wirral Line Upton M53 motorway Storeton Heswall Merseytravel boundary Neston Burton Point England-Wales border Sealand Rifle Range Halt Birkenhead Junction Golf Club Platform Hawarden Bridge River Dee Shotton; North Wales Coast Line Hawarden Buckley Hope High Level Penyffordd Hope Caergwrle Cefn-y-Bedd Gwersyllt Shrewsbury to Chester Line Wrexham General Wrexham Central Shrewsbury to Chester line

The Borderlands Line is the railway line between Wrexham, Wales, and Bidston, Wirral, England.

Passenger train services are operated by Arriva Trains Wales between Wrexham Central and Bidston. Trains run every hour Monday to Saturday daytime, every two hours after 18:45 and on Sundays. Connections with other National Rail services are at Bidston (for Merseyrail services to West Kirby, Birkenhead and Liverpool), Shotton (for Chester and the North Wales Coast Line) and Wrexham General (for the Shrewsbury-Chester Line).

The line is sometimes also referred to as the Mid Wirral Line.

Holders of the Concessionary Travel Pass resident in Wrexham and Flintshire can travel free along part of the line, from Wrexham Central Station to Hawarden Bridge Station.^[1]

Rolling Stock

The train service is normally operated with Class 150s. It was formerly operated by Class 153s, but in October 2006 the operator started using Class 150s or paired Class 153 units, but the latter disappeared in favour of the Class 150s in December 2006.

Infrastructure History

The southern part of the line was built by the Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway (WMCQR) and the northern part by the North Wales and Liverpool Railway, a joint committee of the WMCQR and the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway. Both railways were acquired by the Great Central Railway on 1 January 1905.

Two Wirral stations on the line closed in the 1950s; Storeton in 1951 and Burton Point in 1955. No trace of the station at Storeton remains, yet Burton Point station is still almost entirely intact, the station buildings currently forming part of a garden centre.

Development

The Borderlands Line is the Wirral's most underdeveloped line and has comparatively few stations.

Proposals exist to electrify some or all of the line and incorporate it into the Wirral Line of the Merseyrail network, allowing through services to Birkenhead and Liverpool with new stations at Deeside Industrial Park, Woodchurch and Beechwood, but nothing definitive has been confirmed. In August 2006 it was announced there would be a feasibility study into the 3rd-rail electrification of the line.^[2]

There have been proposals included in the electrification plan for the construction of two new stations on the Wirral section of the line; Beechwood between Bidston and Upton to serve the Beechwood estate, and Woodchurch to serve Prenton, the Woodchurch estate and the North Cheshire Business Park as well as providing connections to and from most of West Wirral's bus services to Birkenhead, and to "park and ride" travellers from other parts of the Wirral via the M53 motorway.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Borderlands Line

• Official Website
• Wrexham-Birkenhead Rail Users' Association
• The Wrexham-Bidston Line
• PDF detailing possible addition to Wirral Line services (Page 33) - broken link