Wigan Album

Who can name all the makes of cars on the image?

i can still remember the gates & lines at the bottom of king st .

Ron, A great photo. I have many memories of Central Station with its wooden flooring and platform. Of Saturday morning shopping trips to Wigan, boarding the noisy rattling old tank engine powered steam trains from Westleigh and Bedford Station with my grandparents, parents, and aunt and cousin, in the late 1940s and 1950s. A building that was part of the history of Wigan
I believe the visible cars present on the forecourt to the station are from left to right - Bedford van/Dormobile,Austin 8 circa 1938/40, Sunbeam Rapier, Austin A35. Parked on the road facing the camera - Ford Anglia.

Just up from the old swimming baths.

The car on the road is a Ford 100E. On the car park are an Austin A30 with a Triumph Spitfire behind it, a Sunbeam, (Rootes Group), an Austin A12 and a Bedford CA Van.

PS....Oddly, I don't remember Central Station! I never went further down Station Road than The Ritz Pictures! xx

Whups, I think you are a bit astray with your geography there. The station was nowhere near King St.

Just noticed the bus shelter I can remember them being down Library street Never saw any of them smashed up!!!!!!!!!There must be some correlation between the lack of deterrent and the increase in vandalism and other crime..

I passed this station many times but only peeped inside once just to see what it was like.
If it had been in any other upmarket town it would have been renovated to live in or a an upmarket restaurant. It looked so quaint.

Ron. Top right hand corner. Is that the edging of some kind of veranda?.

The station was on Station Rd just past the children's library , not too far from the old swimming baths on Millgate. If I was going 'up town' sometimes I would walk down Scholes and turn at the Horseshoe pub and carry along Station Rd., or up Millgate where the old baths were.

The Grand Arcade is built on this very site.

Used to catch the train from Hindley South to watch Wigan at Central Park.I remember there was a fireplace showroom inside the station.

Albert, wasn't there an art deco type canopy above the Empress Café and ballroom, I'm sure I've seen a photo of it before they had put up the large white Casino canopy.

I've found an advertising poster on the Album showing the canopy, but it's not as I thought it was, I'm possibly thinking of another building.
https://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=5&id=1072&gallery=Empress+Ballroom&offset=0

You are so right Veronica,about that station,it looked really good. The 'town planners' seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Actually Elizabeth I always thought it was far nicer than the other two stations.

Albert S, the veranda I think was part of the old Empress Ballroom later to become Wigan Northern Soul all night club. Just about this spot was the terminus for the 15 Bolton, 17 Haigh, 18 Horwich, all the bus services that went via Aspull.

Definitely it was,Veronica.

I believe the station closed in 1964 and was demolished soon after so it might give an indication about when this photograph was taken.

Well, I suppose the 'town planners' could have told British Rail to pull one of the other stations down and put this one in its place... or turned Central Station into the Northern Soul nightspot.. or what? What on earth do you do with a redundant railway terminus, however weird its architectural features?

Believe it or not, but you could buy a ticket to London from here. The long journey would take you to St Pancras via Manchester and Derby. Am I correct, train buffs?

I went to Old Trafford a couple of times from here The station was right outside the ground at the back of the Main Stand

That’s true jarvo,there where 2 prestige trains that ran from Manchester to London,the peaks and the palatine,you would have to change at Manchester central to get to london from Wigan central

chris i never mentioned the station i was on about the lines further down at the bottom of king st .

After the station closed it was used as a bathroom showroom by George Makinsons. The last train was on 2nd November 1964.

We used to catch the train to Jump,Barnsley from here change at Penistone when I was young.

In reply to what use it would have been, lot of things it seems.

I believe my cousin Jenny and I used to travel into Wigan from Ince arriving at this station. There was a multi storey car park on this site for many years after it was demolished.

A friend of mine worked in the ticket Office of the Central Station. He persuaded us to use the Central Station line to go to watch Wigan R L v Liverpool Stanley. I can't remember how convenient or otherwise it was but it didn't matter because Wigan won.
When the station closed it became a showroom for bathroom furniture

Does anyone know when this station was built? I have a 5x Grt grandmother who came from Penistone Yorkshire.. wondering if this is the Station she arrived at. She married at the Parish Church in the early 1830's.

One thing for sure if the Northern Soul had been based there , it would most likely have still been burned down.

Central Station dates back to the opening of the line from Darlington Street to Central station 01-08-1892 as part of the Wigan Junction Railway/Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire railway extension of 1883. In 1906 it was absorbed into the Great Central Railway then in 1923 it became part of the LNER. This info gain from the 1992 edition of "The Industrial Railways of the Wigan Coalfield Coalfield pt 1. I think I travelled from Central station in the 1950's with my parents on a day outing.

Brendell, if you arrived at Wigan Central you would have got on the train at Lower Ince station. That station closed in November 1964 as did Wigan Central for passenger traffic. In the early sixties, very early in the morning before 6 o'clock, newspapers used to be set out for sale inside the entrance to the station. Nobody was there to sell you them and you just put your money in a tin.

John, I never knew that and find it fascinating! And I'm sure people were honest in paying for them.

Irene, I'm sure that people must have been honest or they wouldn't have carried on selling them like that,. Any thieves would still be in bed at that time of day!

My first job on leaving school was at what was formerly the massive Risley Royal Ordnance Factory which, by that time, had become HMS Risley and a Royal Navy stores. I used to get the train at some ungodly hour from Wigan Central which had a loop line from the main line to Manchester Central which had been constructed just pre WW2 and into Risley's own railway station

My dad worked at Risley after being demobbed for a time, he must have used that railway station then. He hadn't far to walk.
I wonder if travel was free to go to the Risley factory. As it was free to travel to Chorley ROF in the mid sixties early seventies.

My grandad worked on the station then when it closed transfered to the goods yard off Darlington st.

Hard to believe that it is now in the Grand Arcade. I think that was the bus stop for routes going up Whelley to New Springs, Horwich, Blackrod and the 15 to Bolton where you would see both Wigan and Bolton Corporation buses.

Veronica , travel to Risley wasn't free when it had become a RN stores. The princely sum of four shillings (20p to younger visitors to the site) was deducted from my wages to cover rail travel.

By the time I started at Chorley ROF in '66 Derek it was coaches for travel although just previous to that trains ran there. I recall seeing the rail lines. I was never as well off by working there, I loved it, no travelling expenses , even the laundry was done for you. The only bug bear was the clumpy, laced up shoes we had to wear.

Mr X. I remember the Bolton buses very well going from Scholes to see relatives in Aspull. They always seemed more exotic - I think the conductor wore a lighter coloured uniform and a different ticket machine. In my minds the I always think of the Bolton bus colours as Brown and cream, but the official description is Maroon and cream.

Mr X. I remember the Bolton buses very well going from Scholes to see relatives in Aspull. They always seemed more exotic - I think the conductor wore a lighter coloured uniform and a different ticket machine. In my minds the I always think of the Bolton bus colours as Brown and cream, but the official description is Maroon and cream.

rev long
what should have happened was ,it should have remained open.beeching did not save money at all, he cost the country millions upon millions.
towns like leigh having no rail links,a preposterous notion .swallowed by a 1960's council that believed government tripe about buses can take the strain.
eg an estimated £768 million to restore the cambridge/ oxford rail link,most of which is mothballed.

IIRC Central park was named from this railway station ?