Corkickle railway station


Corkickle railway station serves the Whitehaven suburb of Corkickle in Cumbria, England. The railway station is a stop on the scenic Cumbrian Coast Line south west of Carlisle. The station opened in 1855 and is at the southern end of the tunnel from Whitehaven railway station. At times it was known as 'Whitehaven Corkickle' station.
The station is owned by Network Rail and is operated by Northern who provide all passenger train services.

Facilities

The single platform station has kept its main building, but this is now in private residential use. Shelters, a public telephone, ticket vending machine and a digital information board are sited near the main entrance, which has step-free access from the approach road. Train running information can also be obtained from timetable posters on the platform.

Passenger service

Monday to Saturdays there is hourly service northbound to Carlisle and southbound to Barrow-in-Furness. There are no trains after 21:00 on Mondays-Saturdays, but since the May 2018 timetable change a Sunday service now operates from mid-morning until early evening.

Freight

The area immediately south of the station was for many years a busy freight location, handling haematite ore traffic from Moor Row mine as well as the aforementioned chemical tankers up & down the incline at the nearby Preston Street goods depot and associated yard. Two signal boxes supervised the sidings, as well as controlling access to and from the incline and the Moor Row branch. 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 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 main line, a short distance to the south of Corkickle station, to the Earl of Lonsdale's Croft Pit.
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 - at Kells. It was used mainly to haul rail tanker wagons containing sulphuric acid from the main line - by now in the ownership of British Railways - 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.