Anyone heard of this? I bought a copy of an Act of Parliament on e-bay. It's dated 1851; front page is the first pic. The second pic. is the paragraph referring to the South Reserve. My deduction is that was in the area shown in the attached map from 1910. In the Act, there's no mention of the construction of any railway lines, so I must assume they were already in existence: in 1851, Grange Lane station had been opened and closed, Monks' Ferry was in operation and Woodside and Town stations not yet built. The proposed station was for goods; there is specific mention that it would not be used for passengers. I suspect that it would have been at the end of the lines through the Haymarket tunnel. Obviously, this is just a bill to permit building; I don't know if it was ever built.
The South Reserve was the name given to the large area of reclaimed land on the south side of Wallasey Pool that was created to cut off the pool from the river and out of which Egerton and Morpeth Docks were excavated. 1858 maps of Birkenhead show that there were then two goods stations at this end of the railway's Dock Branch: one was the GWR Warehouse shown near the centre of your map extract next to Bridge Street, the other was for the Cheshire Junction Railway and was on the quayside next to the Dock Warehouses opposite the end of Cathcart Street. As the Shrewsbury and Chester Railway appears to have been part of the Great Western network, I suspect that the proposed 1851 station could refer to the former, though I would hardly describe the one shown on the map as being "on" the South Reserve which technically ended at Shore Road.
It's in one of those railway books, the Railways of Cheshire or something, I have the books but my mrs has tidied them away and that's as bad as putting them in a black hole, hopefully they will reappear so I can read them again :-)
Part of a map showing one of the various proposals put forward for the arrangement of the entrance to the Great Float, this one by Hartley from 1856. This clearly shows the areas known as the North and South Reserve, which each consisted of 60 acres of reclaimed land.
Thanks for that. Interesting to compare it with the 1911 O.S. map. By then, what was the Woodside Basin had been filled in and was the site of the lairage and the Morpeth Branch Dock. Also, there was by then a G.W.R. goods station on the South Reserve; I wonder if that's the one the Act referred to?
The terms continued to be used by railwaymen associated with the docks - the South Reserve also had cryptically-named individual small yards and sidings - such as Manchester Siding - which may be self-explanatory.
