Liverpool St James railway station
Liverpool St James station in Liverpool, England, was a railway station situated on the old Cheshire Lines Committee line from between Central and stations. This line is now a part of Merseyrail's Northern Line. The station is located in a deep cutting between two tunnels at the junction of Parliament Street and St. James' Place, opposite St James' Church. There are plans in place by Merseytravel and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority to reopen the station. Subject to funding, the station could reopen in 2025. History. The station opened on 1 March 1874  and closed on 1 January 1917. In 1913 six people lost their lives in an accident at the station when a train ran into the back of a train standing at the southbound platform. Parts of the station's platforms survive, as do some rooms cut into the rockface. They can be seen on Northern Line trains heading for or . Future. The station site's proximity to the M&S Bank Arena, Anglican Cathedral, King's Waterfront, Cains Brewery Village and other more recent developments in the surrounding area has focused public attention on reopening it. In 2012 Liverpool's Strategic  Investment Framework listed the reopening of St James as important to the success of the Baltic Triangle development. Merseytravel agreed to work with Liverpool Vision in March 2014 to investigate the cost of reopening the station and its projected usage. In January 2015 Merseytravel confirmed that they would be carrying out a study for the station's potential reopening in the 2015-16 financial year. Merseyrail listed the re-opening of the station as a 'top rail project' during a presentation on rail development and delivery in November 2016. Merseytravel commissioned a report into the reopening of the station which  was completed in September 2017. The report compared reopening St James against the construction of a new station in the Chinatown area of Liverpool. Whilst the report found many benefits to opening a station in the Chinatown area, it concluded that: "A new station at St James is feasible and potentially highly beneficial, albeit at a high cost and with correspondingly reduced value for money." Merseytravel's chairman Cllr Liam Robinson stated in an interview with the Liverpool Echo in February 2019 that reopening the station would be a significant task and would involve the construction of new platforms, ticket  offices, waiting areas and lift shafts. Liverpool City Region Combined Authority announced in August 2019 that they were planning to use part of a £172m funding package to reopen the station, subject to the plans being approved. In October 2020, it was announced that £1.2 million of these funds were to be used to commission Network Rail to complete the next stage of design work for the reopening project. A further £300,000 of these funds had been used to purchase a plot of land adjacent to the station site upon which the Combined Authority hopes a  future ticket office might be constructed. In 2020, the Combined Authority applied for additional funding for the reopening project from the third round of the Department for Transport's New Stations Fund. A public vote was put forward in January 2022 by Merseytravel and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority to chose a name for the station when it reopens. Officials felt that the existing name for the station would cause confusion with James Street station. The public were asked to chose a new name from: On the 12th April 2022, the results of the vote were announced, with 77.7 % of the public voting for Liverpool Baltic as the name of the new station.