English: Disused Railway Tunnel
This is the western portal of the 1846 freight tunnel that led from the goods yard at Crown Street to the railway junction at Edge Hill in Liverpool, a deep cutting with a grand moorish arch where the locomotives were originally attached to trains on their way west.
Crown Street was the location of what is considered to be the world's first passenger railway station when the railway first opened in 1830, a little to the north and west of the site of this picture. In addition to the passenger station with its offices, waiting rooms and overall roof there was also goods facilities and accommodation for coal merchants. The Crown Street passenger terminus soon proved inadequate due to its size and distance from the city centre and it was closed on 15th August 1836 on the opening of a new terminus at Lime Street in May 1835, much closer to the city centre (until 1870 trains were hauled up and down from Edge hill by ropes rather than by locomotives).
Crown Street was relegated to a goods and engineering maintenance depot, and in 1846 this second double-track tunnel was cut from Edge Hill to allow locomotive access to the greatly expanding goods yard there. The yard eventually closed in 1968, and was landscaped into a park. The double tunnel, terminating in this single track, is still used as a head shunt for reversing trains at Edge Hill, and sometimes to park them, but little else now remains of this historic site.
A view of the tunnel mouth of the original 1829 Stephenson tunnel can be seen on the Edge Hill website [1], taken in 1979 shortly before it was blocked up.