Ormskirk, Preston and Southport
Travellers' Association
the user group for West Lancashire's railways
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Constitution
OPSTA campaigns
for the retention, improvement and development of West Lancashire's railways. By lobbying at local and national level, OPSTA has played a significant role in ensuring that south west Lancashire and north Merseyside still has direct rail links north to south and east to west.
The Association was founded in 1981 as the Ormskirk and Preston Travellers Association by a group of like-minded concerned individuals, who worried that a vital transport link - the railway between Ormskirk and Preston - was destined for closure. It suffered from an infrequent and unreliable service attracting the bare minimum of support. The irregular timetable left a lot to be desired and with trains missing through failure, benefitted only the local driving schools as passengers abandoned the line for the A59. By rallying rail users and local bodies to the cause, OPTA was formed and began to apply pressure through correspondence, publicity, affiliation with other groups and local public meetings for the retention and improvement of the train service. The line survived.
One of the ways OPTA promoted the line was by chartering trains and offering day excursions from Ormskirk, Burscough, Rufford and Croston to places such as Appleby on the Settle-Carlisle line, the Peak District, Shropshire, Llandudno, Durham, Gloucester and London; possibly something we should consider reprising.
Subsequently, the group changed its name to OPSTA when it started campaigning on behalf of the Southport-Manchester line. Plans for a single line operation were thwarted by lobbying with help from many quarters. In recent times there has been a sustained campaign to maintain direct services from Southport to both the north and south sides of Manchester, and reinstatement of an airport service lost in 2018.
The “West Lancashire lines” provide; vital commuter routes between the major conurbations of Southport, Wigan and Manchester, and between the communities of south west Lancashire and the cities of Preston and Liverpool via Ormskirk; as well as leisure and business access to the national network at Preston, Liverpool, Wigan and Manchester. OPSTA still exists to ensure those links are maintained and improved.
Before the Beeching cuts and subsequent route rationalisation, the Ormskirk and Preston, and Southport and Manchester lines were joined at Burscough, the north and south chords known as “the Burscough Curves” enabled direct travel between Ormskirk and Southport, and Southport and Preston. A relatively low cost project could restore that flexibility and add valuable options to direct travel across West Lancashire. OPSTA has long campaigned for such a scheme and in 2021 constructed a bid sponsored by Lancashire County Council and local MPs to the Restoring our Railway scheme.
That was unsuccessful but the campaign continues and a more immediate low-cost project that OPSTA is promoting is the extension of Merseyrail services north of Ormskirk, incrementally to Burscough and Rufford, as the initial stage of a development that would become an integrated Liverpool-Ormskirk-Southport-Preston network.
Similarly OPSTA advocates extension of public transport links from Kirkby and its new station at Headbolt Lane to Skelmersdale and Wigan.
OPSTA has always produced a regular newsletter which has now exceeded 150 editions and nowadays members receive additional, frequent updates by email.
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