Wrexham General station
This was once two railway stations. Both had their origins in the scramble for lucrative carriage of locally produced coal and iron.
The North Wales Mineral Railway was first on the scene, set up in 1844 to create a railway between Chester and Ruabon. Eventually this line passed to the Great Western Railway, which named the station Wrexham General and rebuilt it from 1909 to 1912. The distinctive shape of the station building’s roof (which you can look down on from the road bridge) was a feature of GWR stations of that period.
The other station here, Wrexham Exchange, lay on the 1863 line of the Wrexham, Mold and Connah’s Quay Railway. This line became the only Welsh outpost of the London & North Eastern Railway, famous for the Flying Scotsman on the East Coast Main Line. From Exchange, trains to Birkenhead or to Wrexham Central, Bangor-on-Dee and Ellesmere.
Wrexham’s stations were unusually busy in 1876. Wrexham’s Art Treasures Exhibition attracted 80,000 visitors. Entry was half-price for people who arrived on the GWR’s cheap excursion trains on Saturdays to Mondays, from as far away as Manchester and Birmingham. When the National Eisteddfod was held in Wrexham in August 1876, special trains were provided on all lines leading to Wrexham, including London & North Western Railway trains from Llanberis, Nantlle, Llandudno, St Asaph, Ruthin and Mold.
William Page, who drove the Wynnstay Arms’ omnibus, died in 1866 after a gust of wind blew papers from his pocket at Wrexham General. He retrieved them from the track but then noticed he’d missed one, so he jumped back down to fetch it – about five metres ahead of an approaching engine.
In 1889 a train filled with passengers derailed near Wrexham Exchange, injuring the engine driver and fireman and blocking the main GWR line towards Chester. An official inquiry found that an empty horsebox between the engine and heavy coaches had jumped the track, having not been coupled tightly enough to the engine. The horsebox should have been attached to the rear of the train.
The GWR promoted William Edward Jones to a “responsible position” at Wrexham General in the 1880s. Later he was dismissed because of his drinking. He then became an “expert railway thief”. In 1903 a Newport court sentenced him to prison with hard labour for stealing, among other things, a passenger’s new suit, a Gladstone bag and items of GWR property.
After nationalisation, the ex-LNER line was truncated to Wrexham Central. Wrexham General’s status was downgraded in 1967 when British Railways withdrew its trains to London Paddington. The fusion of Exchange and General stations was completed in 2011, when Network Rail provided a passenger lift to ensure everyone could access one half of the station from the other, without a detour over the road bridge.
Postcode: LL11 1EL View Location Map