I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Blowick/Meols Cop area of Southport recently. It’s and area I grew up in because until I started primary school my week was spent with my maternal grandmother so that my parents could concentrate on their business and my two older brothers as there was an age gap between them and I. ‘Nanna’ lived in Cobden Rd, in sight and smell of the gasworks and the railways out to Wigan. I could glimpse steam engines pass by if I ran upstairs to her back bedroom, where i could catch glimpses of them through the gaps in the houses. Ironically, my sister now lives just the other side of the railway, although you’re hard-pressed to see anything due the the tree cover that hides the line nowadays.
‘Nanna’ was always taking us for walks, so I got to explore a lot of the local area. one area that fascinated me was the old Meols Cop car sheds, where the Liverpool-Southport electric trains were maintained. The adjacent line to Preston had already closed, having finished in 1964, but coal trains still ran up the line to Hesketh park station and the sheds remained open until 1969.
Here’s a link to the ‘disused stations’ website which tells you all about the car sheds and surrounding railways and includes some fascinating old photographs.
The area’s very different today. You’d be forgiven for not knowing such a hive of railway activity had even existed. Now the area’s woodland and the site of a school.
I have a personal link and memories to the electric car sheds, which is through the old ‘Steamport, Southport‘ museum which once occupied the old locomotive depot adjacent to Southport station. As a very young teenager way back in the early 1970s I was one of the founding members. One of the first major tasks was to secure the loco shed. It had never been fitted with doors, but the closure of the electric car sheds presented us with the opportunity to acquire some. BR gave us permission to salvage stuff from the car shed, which included the large wooden doors. The only problem was how to move them. Now, this was in the early days of railway preservation, when ingenuity and muscle power could make things happen which modern Health and Safety simply wouldn’t allow.
So, one Sunday morning a band of us turned up on site at Meols Cop. One chap had brought a gas-axe, and soon a couple of the doors had been cut down. I can’t remember the exact method, but it was ‘inventive’. But how to transport the doors? We didn’t have a vehicle big enough? What we did have was one of the old iron-wheeled station trollies that used to be used on most LMS stations for moving parcels. We managed to load one of the doors onto it and pushed and pulled it through the streets of Southport back to Ste½amport. The iron wheels of the trolley left some interesting trails on the tarmac roads as we passed.As you can imagine, the whole process involved a lot of sweat, scatching of heads – and a fair bit of invective. I may have learned a few new words that day! Plus, Southport may be flat, but the most direct route involved a fair few railway bridges. Crazy, but fun! Such was railway preservation in those days.
Eventually, the doors were fitted to Steamport, giving us a secure shed. They were still there when the shed became derelict once more – as this January 2000 picture shows.
Here’s a few modern day pictures of the area around the car shed, taken this past week.
Sadly, I don’t have any photographs from those long-gone days, which is a shame. But I’m sure that some exist, somewhere…
I’ve a small favour to ask…
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Cheers,
Paul
Paul Bigland 