Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram has described delays to the planned £100m Liverpool Baltic railway station as “the bane of my life”, admitting that construction will not begin by the end of this year as he had hoped.
Project Stalled Despite Planning Permission
Planning permission for the station was granted in January 2026, but no contractor has yet been appointed. The station, a key part of Rotheram’s Merseyrail for All pledge, will be built on the site of the disused St James Station, closed in 1917 during the First World War. The site lies in a cutting beneath the Baltic Triangle, a former industrial area now home to creative and hospitality businesses between Liverpool city centre and the south of the city.
Rotheram, speaking on BBC Radio Merseyside on Wednesday, expressed frustration: “Bane of my life. I was saying to officers I want you to act more quickly and they were saying it was going to start in 2028 and I was saying no chance, we need that to be far sooner. I wanted it to start by the end of this year to tell you the truth. It looks like that’s not going to happen.”
Bureaucratic Hurdles and Fragmentation
The mayor blamed the delays on the complexity of working on a live railway line. “It’ll start much later than we wanted it to, that’s because the station we’re going to build is on live rails and we’re trying to get something called possessions, which is to stop those trains running for certain periods and to run bus replacement services. It’s safer to do it that way but we have to get permissions from the rail authorities and that is a bureaucratic nightmare, which is every time I talk about rail, I talk about the fragmentation, it’s just debilitating really.”
Despite the setbacks, Rotheram confirmed the scheme will go ahead. The project was announced in 2022 with an aim to have passengers on board by “late” 2027. Once open, the station is expected to support hundreds of jobs and deliver 17,000 journeys per day.
Long-Awaited Reopening
Desire for a new station in the area dates back to 2012, when reopening St James Station was identified as vital for the Baltic Triangle’s development. In March 2014, Merseytravel agreed to collaborate with Liverpool Vision to investigate costs and projected usage. By January 2015, a study was planned for the 2015–16 financial year, and a year later, Merseyrail marked it as a “top rail project”.
The main station building will be located on a triangular plot bordered by Stanhope Street to the south, Ashwell Street to the east and north, and the Merseyrail Northern line cutting to the west.
