Birkenhead Railway
The Birkenhead Railway was a railway company in North West England. It was incorporated as the Birkenhead, Lancashire and Cheshire Junction Railway (BL&CJR) in 1846 to build a line connecting the port of Birkenhead and the city of Chester with the manufacturing districts of Lancashire by making a junction near Warrington with the Grand Junction Railway. The BL&CJR took over the Chester and Birkenhead Railway in 1847, keeping its own name for the combined company until it shortened its name to the Birkenhead Railway in 1859. It was taken over jointly, on 1 January 1860, by the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) and the Great Western Railway (GWR). It remained a joint railway until nationalisation of the railways in 1948.
| Overview | |||
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| Locale | Cheshire Merseyside | ||
| Successor | British Railways | ||
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| Track gauge | 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge | ||
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Birkenhead Joint Railway | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Apart from the Hooton–West Kirby line which closed in 1962 almost the whole BL&CJR network is still in mainline use. Part of the railway is now used by the Chester branch of the Wirral Line, one of the two urban electric commuter rail services operated by Merseyrail on Merseyside.