Branch Lines of the Chester & Holyhead Railway

This book complements the author’s previous book on the Chester and Holyhead Railway and completes the story of railways associated with the London and North Western Railway in north Wales. It does so by breaking down developments to three districts working from east to west across the region. The book examines the background to the construction of the branch lines in the context of relevant wider railway developments. It provides an account of the operation of each of the lines with reference to significant incidents on the railway and the relationship of the branch to the communities it served.

The dominance of railways peaked around 1914 so the book analyses the process of decline from that status. That decline was relatively rapid and featured several rounds of closures of stations and branches, culminating in the notorious Beeching cuts of the 1960s that eventually left north Wales with fewer than fifty miles of branch railways – under 20% of the original total.

The book has maps and tables that provide an overview of the detail contained in the text and the 150 photographs. The book concludes with an overview of the railway system in north Wales. It reflects on how reductions might have been made without depriving so much of the region of a presence on the network, and how the railway policies adopted by private companies and the later nationalized industry paid too little attention to the relationship between the region and its trains.