SHEDCODE Special
This month we look at one of the country’s largest steam sheds – Liverpool’s legendary Edge Hill.
The story of Liverpool’s substantial Edge Hill shed is a long and complex one, beginning in the dawn of the main line railways in 1830 and the formation of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (LMR). No less a person than George Stephenson himself designed a running shed and workshop which was scheduled to be built the same year at Wavertree Lane. However, history suggests that construction was not begun and completed until 1831 at Edge Hill instead, during which time all servicing of LMR engines was undertaken in the open.
Hard on the heels of the opening of the LMR’s ‘engine house’, the nascent Grand Junction Railway (GJR) had also designs on the Edge Hill site, and by 1834 it too had opened a shed there, with a second, larger building of 190ft length equipped with three roads following in 1839. The 1834 shed was then converted into a heavy workshop. This situation did not last long as, shortly afterwards, the GJR moved its operation to Crewe, handing over the buildings to its former landlords and owners of the site– the LMR – which had been charging them 6% ‘on a fair valuation of any warehouses, wharves, shed or conveniences which may be required’.
There was then a gap of over 20 years before the site was developed again, this being the submission of plans in 1861 for a shed to hold 80 engines, the tender for which was approved in May 1864 by the London & North Western Railway (LNWR). At a then ‐high cost of £17,000, this sturdy brick building dwarfed anything already existing on the site, being essentially square, with 20 roads of 200ft each under the familiar Webb-style hipped roof. Facilities included rear offices, two 42ft turntables and a coaling stage, with the two latter separated from the shed by two tracks leading beyond a large embankment. The general Edge Hill site increased further in 1882 when the sorting sidings – nicknamed the ‘Grid Iron’ owing to their shape – opened. By this time, it had become the largest passenger depot in Liverpool and expanded again in 1902 when the rear of the original building was bolstered by a new structure. Roads 1-6 could now extend through the main shed to dead-ends inside the new building. The additional shed also differed in aesthetics, being built to the later LNWR pattern with a northlight-fitted roof.
Given its by-now important status, Edge Hill was installed with a new coaling plant – one of the very first – in 1914 built using the Hennibique System out of ferroconcrete. Its construction involved the demolition of the tank house, while 150 hopper-b
