Current position of railways through the parish

The Manchester Ship Canal railway is long gone but the remains described elsewhere on this site are still visible. Perhaps the Peel Group will utilise the old junction at Walton from the main line down to the side of the canal for their proposed Port Warrington and not use the roads through Moore village.

Passenger trains

The original line through the parish, called the Grand Junction Railway when it was constructed, is now more usually referred to as the West Coast mainline and the passenger service is run by Avanti. The open access policy in place now allows other companies to apply for train access, Grand Central plan to have a number of daily services between Blackpool North and London Euston although they will not stop at Warrington Bank Quay. We do get occasional special passenger trains through the parish, some hauled by steam locomotives and some by diesel locomotives. Often these are going north to run along one of the iconic routes, the Settle and Carlisle line, or the Cumbrian Coast route, but not always. The passenger trains along this route have seen a change of livery for the new Avanti operating company.

The Warrington to Chester line has seen a change of franchise from ‘Arriva Trains Wales’ to ‘Transport for Wales’ necessitating a new livery to be applied all the train carriages; do look out for the new white and red livery. Northern Rail have an hourly service connecting Chester and Leeds.

Freight trains

A variety of trains pass along the West Coast mainline carrying many different cargoes. A sample of which are nuclear fuel, imported coal and biomass for power stations, aggregate, china clay, intermodal or container trains, domestic waste from Knowsley and aluminium ingots which will return from the continent as panels for vehicles. These are run by a variety of companies including COLAS, Direct Rail Services, GBRF, Freightliner, and DB/EWS. You may see an all yellow train which is looking to our safety and the quality of the railway track, this is a measurement train collecting data.

Colas log train on the Chester line.

The Chester line sees log trains that run between a variety of locations in the north to Kronospan at Chirk and sand trains that run between Middleton Towers and the Ince and Elton ENRIC works. One train each week takes coal to Penyffordd. The log train is run by Colas and the sand and coal workings by EWS/DB.