Huyton Countdown

We hope that after the nine day blockade at Huyton which starts on the 5th of July we will have three track operation through Roby and Huyton stations.  (See track plans here - I'm not aware of any changes to these plans.)

A lot of work remains to be done at Huyton, and with only three weeks and one day to go before the blockade starts, things are beginning to hot up.  I even saw work under way in the evening, yesterday.

The next stage at Huyton comes next week, when the public subway is to be closed for a week.  This will require the station subway to be brought back into use.  Since the lifts are far from complete, pedestrians who are unable to use the subway steps will be shuttled to the other side of the station in a minibus - This service will be available 24 hours a day.

As you can see, the brick facings on the lift shaft and machine rooms are going up.

This "bridge" appeared last night.  It crosses the new trackbed linking the future platform 4 to the platform 2 and 3 island.  I'm guessing that this will be the northern access to the station next week, and therefore the only route between north and south while the public subway is closed.  You can see that the platform edging on platform 4 (On the right.) is almost complete, whereas there's still a lot of work to do on platform 3.  This did make me wonder if the three track layout is going be temporarily slewed to use platform 4 instead of 3, but the track already laid would seem to indicate otherwise.

This rather confusing shot is looking east from Huyton station along the line of the future track 4 (or Up Chat Moss Slow)  In the foreground is the bridge being constructed over the public subway.