Plans for Merseyrail station approved ahead of Everton's Bramley-Moore Dock stadium move

The Toffees are set to make the move from Goodison Park to their new, 52,888-seat stadium on the banks of the River Mersey next summer, ready for the start of the 2025-26 football season.

With large swathes of fans expected to make use of Bramley-Moore Docks’ nearest Merseyrail station, Sandhills, Liverpool Council has now signed off on a planning application for the creation of a fan management zone.

Sandhills will be a key transport hub for Blues and visiting fans getting to and from the state-of-the-art arena and city centre. As a result, special arrangements are being made to accommodate the numbers of people expecting to use the narrow access to the station and its single island platform.

According to documents submitted by Merseytravel, the organisation has developed plans with Everton, the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, British Transport Police, Liverpool Council and Merseyrail to deal with the increased footfall - with the new stadium able to hold 13,000 more fans than Everton’s current home.

An operational management statement said: “The results of this work indicate that although the platforms at Sandhills and the trains serving the station could accommodate and process the volume of predicted additional passengers expected to use the services in a reasonable time period, the access to the platforms is constrained, and this places a limitation on the number of passengers that can access/egress the platform at times of likely high demand.”

The proposed solution is to develop a new pedestrian waiting area dedicated and specifically designed to accommodate and safely manage passengers at periods of peak demand.

According to the Design and Access statement, the management zone will be used at the end of football matches and other major events, until passengers can be dispatched safely onto train services.

The zone will feature four corral areas, separated by crowd-control barriers, with each section corresponding to a different Merseyrail service, i.e. one would be used for the Ormskirk Line and another would be used for the Southport Line and so on. The requirement for this facility was specified in the Section 106 Agreement of an existing, approved planning application for the new stadium.

Located on land owned by Merseytravel adjacent to the station, passengers will enter the zone via Sandhills Lane, which will be closed to traffic during stadium events in excess of 10,000 people.

During times when crowd management is not needed, the area will revert back to its current use, which is for storage of rail related equipment or activity related to the operation of rail replacement bus services.

Passengers with reduced mobility will be diverted from the main queue by staff, and held in a separate area so they can be given priority to access the station platform via the existing accessible ramps. Users will move through the barrier/queuing system until they can be directed up onto the platform in readiness to board the next available train to their destination.

The plans submitted earlier this year also include the creation of a modular welfare building, to be used by crowd control staff. Liverpool City Council’s planning department will approve this once ‘details of the finished colour of the cabin’ have been submitted.