The Croesnewydd area of Wrexham, centred around the Wrexham Maelor Hospital, is named after Croesnewydd Hall, built in 1696 as a small mansion and a farmhouse replacing an earlier building. In 1985 it was extensively restored and extended as offices as part of Wrexham Technology Park and is a Grade II Listed Building.
Croes Newydd, a derivative of Croesnewydd, was a large steam locomotive shed, marshalling yard and junction in this area. The Wrexham and Minera Railway was opened here on 22 May 1862, situated at the side of the road leading from Croesnewydd to Ruthin Road. Six sidings were provided here able to accommodate hundreds of wagons, and dealt with the weighing of goods from several collieries, including the Minera limeworks, Broughton Hall iron works, Brymbo furnaces, and other goods on the line.
A locomotive shed was added, with a roundhouse and central turntable opened in 1902, to replace outdated facilities at Wheatsheaf junction. It was located in the centre of a large fork junction, with the Chester to Shrewsbury line running along one edge, and the branch being the Wrexham and Minera Branch. The sheds also featured a GWR combined water tower and coaling stage, a design which was later to become standardised.
Under the cutbacks of British Rail in the 1960s, the shed finally closed in 1967. Up until the late 1970s, sidings on the north curve of the former depot site were used for stabling diesel locomotives at weekends. However, with the closure of the Brymbo branch in 1982 this practice ceased. Between closure and the 1980s, Wrexham Corporation (now Wrexham County Borough Council) opened a yard and depot on part of the site. This was home to the town and surrounding area’s rock salt store, as well as the grit spreaders that dispersed it in cold weather. Also kept here were all the grass cutting equipment and road maintenance equipment. After sustaining damage from a minor fire in one of the buildings, the depot was closed and relocated to the nearby Wrexham Industrial Estate in 2009.
In the 1990s, sidings to the southwest of the triangle were developed as a suburban housing estate. In the 2000s, the nearby Wrexham Maelor Hospital extended its car park onto the site of the marshalling yard to the west of the triangle. In 2010, Morrisons, a national supermarket chain, announced its intention to develop a majority of the remaining vacant land into a supermarket and adjoining car park, which replaced almost fifty years of untamed scrub land from the original usage that had formed natural habitats for a wide array of species.
