I recently had a week of annual leave from work, so I decided that it was time to return to Liverpool. I hadn’t been to this city for about 7 years so it was long overdue. However, instead of travelling direct from Burnley – Preston – Liverpool, I made a decision to take a detour via Ormskirk to tick off some Merseyrail stations on my way into Liverpool Central.
The cheapest and most convenient way for me to do this journey was to purchase a Lancashire Day Ranger ticket, although it is only valid after 9am on weekdays, it offers me a large area to travel through and covered me for multiple routes to and from Liverpool if required.
After waiting at Preston for around 40 minutes I set off for Ormskirk, which is a slightly unusual station. Technically it has one platform but is split into P1 and P2 with a gap between the tracks. One side is served by Northern (to Preston) and the other is Merseyrail (to Liverpool Central). Although the Northern services are only one per hour, Merseyrail offers a train to Liverpool every 15 minutes on a week day.
And so I continued my journey towards Liverpool from Ormskirk and took the opportunity to stop off at a few stations on the Ormskirk to Liverpool Central line. The first ‘new’ station I visited was Aughton Park, situated amongst the trees with a road bridge above, this station had some long ramps to walk up to exit onto the main road. After hanging around for 15 minutes I got on the next train to Town Green, this is an interesting station to me as it has the local Police station based here. The ticket office was closed on the day and there is a footbridge to get to the other platform. After another 15 minutes my next train took me to Maghull North, which to me looked like quite a new/modern station complete with a ticket office, lifts and a good sized car park outside.
Next up was Maghull Station, from what I can remember it had quite an authentic look to it, a nice station to have a quick look around. Following Maghull I made the short journey to Old Roan, there wasn’t much here apart from a bus interchange outside, and the station itself looked quite industrial to me. Finally I made it to Aintree which would be my 6th and last station of the day before continuing through to Liverpool. This station seemed bigger than some of the others I’ve seen on the MerseyRail network, maybe designed with the racecourse in mind?
Now that I had ticked off some stations I eventually made it into the city centre. I gave myself 3 hours to explore before my return journey would have to begin at Liverpool Lime Street. It’s a very nice city, with plenty to see and do during the day. There are a lot of old-style buildings and architecture as well as some more modern areas such as the Liverpool One shopping area. Liverpool offers plenty of different museums and art galleries as well as some space nearer to the coast.
After arriving at Liverpool Central my first area to visit was the Pier Head where the Liver Building is located near the River Mersey. Here you can find some boats and the Museum of Liverpool. Once I spent some time walking around the area I then headed back inland to walk around the streets of the city centre. Since I hadn’t been here for a few years I had no sense of direction whatsoever so the signposts were a lifesaver as I had no idea where to go to find anything.
Now that I was satisfied that I’d spent enough time here and seen everything I wanted to see, it was time to start my return journey from Lime Street, going directly back to Preston. Lime Street is a remarkable station with some really nice architecture and is certainly one of the top stations of the North West.
Overall it was a really good day, although a little colder than I’d like.
If you’d like to plan a day out in the Liverpool area, be sure to visit https://www.visitliverpool.com/ to find out more about what the city has to offer.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this.
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