Headbolt Lane is a railway station in Kirkby, Merseyside, England, which opened on 5th October 2023. The station is the interchange between Merseyrail’s Northern Line and the unelectrified Headbolt Lane branch line, operated by Northern.
There is a ticket office that is staffed from 15 minutes before the start of service until 15 minutes after the last train. The station also has a ticket-vending machine. There are multiple shelters on the platforms, along with digital displays and aural announcements on when the next service will be. The station is completely step-free and accessible for all customers. There is an 80-space secure cycle area and a car park with 270 spaces.
The station is the terminus of the current Merseyrail service to Kirkby and Liverpool Central, which currently has a 4 train per hour service, with trains departing every 15 minutes. Also, the station serves as the terminus of the hourly Northern service towards Wigan Wallgate. Almost all Northern services extend beyond Wigan to Manchester Victoria and Blackburn via Todmorden. There is no late evening or Sunday service on this route.
The opening of a station in the area had been an objective since the Transport Plan for Merseyside, published by the Merseyside Passenger Transport Authority in March 1972, with detailed plans first developed in 2013.
The station was initially planned to act as a new Merseyrail terminus, but later proposals — made after the Electrification Task Force declared the Kirkby branch line to be a Tier 1 priority for electrification in 2015 — were devised by Merseytravel and Lancashire County Council to enable Merseyrail services to serve Skelmersdale. In 2017, the two authorities commissioned an initial £5 million feasibility study into establishing the new rail link, including the development of Headbolt Lane. It was initially estimated that it would cost around £300 million and would take up to a decade to deliver. However, in July 2022, the Department for Transport rejected the Strategic Outline Business Case for the extension, suggesting that better bus links with the Kirkby–Wigan rail line would be a cheaper way of improving connectivity.