Corkickle railway station is a railway station serving the suburb of Corkickle near

Whitehaven Whitehaven is a town and port on the English north west coast and near to the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, England. Historically in Cumberland, it lies by road south-west of Carlisle and to the north of Barrow-in-Furness. It is th ...

Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumb ...

, England. It is on the

Cumbrian Coast Line The Cumbrian Coast line is a rail route in North West England, running from Carlisle to Barrow-in-Furness via Workington and Whitehaven. The line forms part of Network Rail route NW 4033, which continues (as the Furness line) via Ulverston an ...

, which runs between and . It is owned by

Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. Network Rail is an "arm's leng ...

and managed by

Northern Trains Northern Trains, branded as Northern, (legally Northern Trains Limited) is a State-owned enterprises of the United Kingdom, publicly owned train operating company in England. It is owned by DfT OLR Holdings for the Department for Transport (DfT) ...

. The station opened on 3 December 1855, and is at the southern end of the tunnel from Whitehaven. Between 1855 and 1957, the station was known as ''Whitehaven Corkickle''.

Facilities

The station building survives as a private residence. The station is a single platform and has shelters, display information and disabled access.

Services

Monday to Saturdays there is hourly service northbound to Carlisle and southbound to

Barrow-in-Furness Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of Barrow-in-Furness. In 2023 the ...

. There are no trains after 21:00 on Mondays-Saturdays, but since the May 2018 timetable change a Sunday service now operates (for the first time since 1976) from mid-morning until early evening.

Freight

The area immediately south of the station was for many years a busy freight location, handling

haematite Hematite (), also spelled as haematite, is a common iron oxide compound with the formula, Fe2O3 and is widely found in rocks and soils. Hematite crystals belong to the rhombohedral lattice system which is designated the alpha polymorph of . ...

ore traffic from Moor Row mine as well as chemical tankers up & down the incline at the nearby Preston Street goods depot (the one time W&FJR passenger terminus) and associated yard. Two

signal boxes On a rail transport system, signalling control is the process by which control is exercised over train movements by way of railway signals and block systems to ensure that trains operate safely, over the correct route and to the proper timetabl ...

(Corkickle No. 1 & No. 2) supervised the sidings, as well as controlling access to and from the incline and the Moor Row branch (the surviving portion of the former

Whitehaven, Cleator and Egremont Railway The Whitehaven, Cleator and Egremont Railway was an English railway company which built and operated a standard gauge railway in Cumberland, England intended to open up the hematite orefield to the south-east of Whitehaven. It opened for go ...

line to Egremont & Sellafield). Although sufficiently busy to require its own resident shunting locomotive well into the 1970s, the gradual loss of traffic from the early 1980s onwards saw facilities run down and following the demise of Preston Street depot, the yard eventually closed (along with both signal boxes, which had been replaced by standard LMR-designed structures in 1958–59) on 15/16 February 1997. Today no trace remains of the sidings or either signal box, only the one surviving running line southwards towards St Bees & Sellafield.

The Corkickle Brake

In 1881 the Corkickle Brake, a roped incline in length and with gradients of between 1 in 5.2 and 1 in 6.6 was built from the

Furness Railway The Furness Railway (Furness) was a railway company operating in the Furness area of Lancashire in North West England. History Formation In the early 1840s, the owners of iron ore mines in the Furness district of Lancashire became interested i ...

main line, a short distance to the south of Corkickle station, to the

Earl of Lonsdale Earl of Lonsdale is a title that has been created twice in British history, firstly in the Peerage of Great Britain in 1784 (becoming extinct in 1802), and then in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1807, both times for members of the Lowth ...

's Croft Pit.Quayle (2006), p.60 The 'brake' closed in 1931 due to the worsening financial situation of the colliery's owners, Lonsdale's Whitehaven Colliery Co. In May 1955, the incline was re-opened, this time to serve the factory of Marchon Products - a subsidiary of

Albright and Wilson Albright and Wilson was founded in 1856 as a United Kingdom manufacturer of potassium chlorate and white phosphorus for the match industry. For much of its first 100 years of existence, phosphorus-derived chemicals formed the majority of its produ ...

- at Kells. It was used mainly to haul rail tanker wagons containing

sulphuric acid Sulfuric acid (American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphuric acid ( Commonwealth spelling), known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is a mineral acid composed of the elements sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen, with the molecular formu ...

from the main line - by now in the ownership of

British Railways British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...

- to the Marchon factory. The Corkickle Brake closed for good on 31 October 1986 when it was the last commercial roped incline in Britain. The task of transporting acid and other chemicals was taken over by road tankers.Quayle (2006), p.61-65

References

Sources

*British Railways London Midland Region Passenger Timetable, 16 September 1957 to 8 June 1958. *GB Rail Timetable Winter Edition 13 December 2009 - 22 May 2010. *Hyde, M. and Pevsner, N ''The Buildings of England: Cumbria''. Yale University Press 2010. *Joy, D. ''Cumbrian Coast Railways''. Dalesman Publishing 1968. *Joy, D. ''A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Volume 14: The Lake Counties''. David and Charles 1983. *Mountford, C.E. ''Rope and Chain Haulage - The Forgotten Element of Railway History''. Industrial Railway Society, 2013. *Quayle, H. ''Whitehaven - The Railways and Waggonways of a Unique Cumberland Port''. Cumbrian Railways Association 2006. * *Routledge, A.W. ''Marchon - The Whtehaven Chemical Works''. Tempus, 2005.

External links

* * {{Railway stations served by Northern Trains Railway stations in Cumbria DfT Category F2 stations Former Furness Railway stations Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1855 Northern franchise railway stations Whitehaven