ON A RECENT visit to Liverpool, when walking near the famous waterfront, my girlfriend and I stumbled across the remnants of a Liverpool institution, now gone: the Overhead Railway, writes Karl Whitney.
First opened to the public on March 6th, 1893, and known to the waggish locals as "the Docker's Umbrella", the railway ran along the windswept docks of the Mersey until the end of December 1956.
Its closure coincided with the ending of tram services on Merseyside, and these two events marked the beginning of a transformation of Liverpool's transport network from which the city is still trying to recover.
In the 1960s, an extensive series of four-lane roads were built to criss-cross the city centre, shooting commuters out of the town to the suburbs, or through the Mersey tunnels to the Wirral peninsula on the other side of the river. At some points, the road bridges and overpasses obscure the views of the beautiful 19th-century public buildings that make the centre of Liverpool so remarkable.
The road remodelling has made it difficult for pedestrians to walk directly from the suburbs to the city. Everton FC's home ground, Goodison Park, north of the city, was the first purpose-built football ground in England, erected at around the same time as the Overhead Railway, in 1892. After watching Everton play Portsmouth there, we walked with some others along a hair-raising route back to the city, darting hastily across busy roads and junctions that had no pedestrian lights, and, at times, no pavement.
One of the children who must have ridden the Overhead Railway was John Lennon, who was 17 when it and the tramways closed. He wrote about both in an early draft of his lyrics for the Beatles' song In My Life. In the recorded version of the song, on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, Lennon sings: "There are places I remember/ All my life, though some have changed,/ Some forever, not for better,/ Some have gone, and some remain." Lennon doesn't say where or what these places are, but he is more explicit in the earlier version, which was based on his recollections of a bus journey on the number 5 route into the city centre from Woolton, where he lived with his aunt Mimi. The trip brings Lennon "past the tramsheds with no trams" - most likely a reference to the nearby Smithdown Road tram depot, which actually closed in 1936, before Lennon was born, but whose abandonment was a poignant symbol of the disuse into which the trams had fallen.
The bus journey transports Lennon "into town . . . to the Docker's Umbrella that they pulled down".
The Overhead Railway was conceived in the closing years of the 19th century as a way of transporting passengers along the waterfront, away from the congestion of the traffic of the road below.
The existing omnibuses were prone to being caught in the traffic jams created by the increasing cargo trade, and the railway, suspended on an iron and steel viaduct overlooking the docks, seemed the ideal solution. It was powered by an electrical current, which minimised the possibility of fires, making it the first electrically powered overhead railway in the world.
The railway initially ran from Herculaneum Dock in the south to Seaforth in the north, a journey of six miles. Later, it was extended, linking with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway to allow direct trains to Aintree, a service which usually ran only when there were race meetings.
The railway, with its vertiginous perspective of the cruise liners docked alongside, provided a spectacle that, it was hoped, would draw tourists in large numbers. "See the wonderful docks and gigantic liners," a poster suggested, with a highly stylised pictorial representation of one of the trains rolling by, a family staring excitedly from its windows down into the funnels of the large boats below.
Never a highly profitable exercise (the various extensions to the line were attempts to tap into commuter markets that never properly materialised) the Overhead Railway continued until, in 1955, it was found that the curved deck plates supporting the track would have to be replaced at a cost of £2 million. The owners of the railway found this sum beyond their resources and decided to close the service. The last train ran on December 30th, 1956, "witnessed by disbelieving crowds along the line", according to Paul Bolger, who has compiled a book of photographs of the railway.
In March 1957, John Lennon formed the Quarrymen, adding Paul McCartney to the band that July; George Harrison joined in March 1958. By the time the "Docker's Umbrella" had been completely pulled down in January 1959, three-quarters of the band that would become the Beatles were already playing music together.
There is now talk in Liverpool - a city which is this year's European Capital of Culture - of the return of the trams, at least in part: a recent transport plan includes a proposal for a single line from the city centre to the suburb of Kirkby, with a view to building further lines subsequently. Kirkby, north-east of the city, is the proposed location of a new football stadium for Everton FC, which will mean the club leaving its historic home ground behind. It is now impossible to look at the club's current home, Goodison Park, without thinking that it may have outlasted the Overhead Railway, but will soon go the same way.