THE RAILWAYS OF WREXHAM

[Source: Paul Wright and Alan Young]

The North Wales coalfield in the environs of Wrexham possessed a remarkably dense and intricate railway network and, for the decade from 1906-16, a most generous supply of railway stations. The principal function of the railways was to transport coal from the many mines in the locality, but early in the twentieth century the Great Western Railway (GWR) decided in this area to apply its policy of adding tiny, cheaply constructed stations (‘halts’) to existing lines and serving them with ‘rail motor cars’ – a combined engine and carriage. The successful experiment in the Stroud area of Gloucestershire in 1903 was rolled out across the GWR, nowhere more zealously than in the Wrexham area, where some former mineral lines (such as those through Wynn Hall and Ponkey) were given a rail-motor service and supplied with numerous halts. The Great Central Railway which owned branches immediately north of Wrexham followed suit, the two companies producing for a short time what was the densest network of lines and stations in Britain outside the main urban centres and South Wales valleys. Almost as quickly as the Wrexham network grew it was to collapse, with all of the branches focussed on Wrexham from the south and north-west closing to passengers by 1931. The Ordnance Survey Quarter-inch (1:250,000) shows the Wrexham area’s passenger railway network at its zenith. The small town of Rhosllanerchrugog (helpfully contracted to Rhos by the GWR) possessed no fewer than six stations or halts.  Its last surviving station, Johnstown & Hafod (Halt) on the Chester – Shrewsbury line, closed in 1960.

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[Source: Paul Wright and Alan Young]


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