Lost pub · London Road

The Railway Inn

1837 to 2005

Built: 1837
Gone: 1 November 2005
There now: Empty. Permission granted in 2021 to convert it to flats
Address: 104 London Road
Where exactly: Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4100154982, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: unoccupied.

A pub built for a station, which outlived the station by 142 years. It went up in 1837 to serve the London Road Station of the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, directly opposite; the Carlisle Journal called it the 'new' Railway Hotel that December. Red sandstone ashlar, two storeys and five bays, with a central raised entrance that had a four-column portico until it was removed early last century. Grade II listed in 1993. It had a bowling green at the back, shown on the 1842 map of Carlisle, the scheme's favourite feature, half a century before the scheme existed.

The passenger station closed in 1863 once the North Eastern got access to the Citadel, and was demolished. The pub carried on. In May 1876 the licence of the Railway Hotel, London Road, passed from John Sirey to Mary Sirey. It was a Carlisle New Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in August 1916, and it went to Greenall Whitley on 21 May 1973.

Its trade was railwaymen: it was the nearest pub to the Upperby enginemen's lodgings, and custom fell away after Upperby depot shut in 1995. Ten years later so did the pub, on 1 November 2005.