Line reached Bagillt. The Chester and Holyhead Railway (now part of the North Wales Coast Line) officially opened on 1 May 1848. The local mines and works that had used these wharves now switched to haulage by steam train. Bagillt railway station had extensive sidings and goods yard. It was closed in 1966 as part of the Beeching cuts, although the station's footbridge still remains. In 1879 a working men's club and cocoa house was built on the High Street in the Pentre area by public subscription. The building was named the Foresters Hall; it is an impressive three-storey red brick building which is supported by the Bagillt Heritage Society. It was built to promote temperance and was originally associated with the Foresters Friendly Society. It was the first cocoa house built in Wales. But the industrial age created problems: in 1848, the same year the railway opened, a book was published in London entitled Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of education in Wales. It detailed the poverty and hard living of many people in Bagillt and the Flintshire coalfields in the 19th century: Bagillt remained a hard-working boom town for more than a century. For instance on 31 May 1873, a local newspaper, the Wrexham Advertiser, reported that so many new coal workings had opened near Bagillt that it was becoming difficult to find enough miners to work in them: In July 1897 work commenced at Boot End, Bagillt, on the huge Milwr Tunnel which would drain water from the mines working the lead lodes under Pentre Halkyn. Digging started at a point below high-water mark on the Dee foreshore. The tunnel was driven southwest at a gradient of 1:1000. It was brick-lined where it passed through coal measures and shale but unlined after the first 1.5 miles where it passed through chert and limestone. In 1908 the tunnel was draining more than 1.7 million gallons of water per day through the drainage channel and into the river at Bagillt. Bagillt was also the site of the Hawarden Iron Works, situated near the Dee Bank Quay. It was famous for production of a number of waterwheels, including the Snaefell Wheel at Laxey, Isle of Man. But by the 1930s the Great Depression had brought hardship and misery to the area as many of the manufacturing works and collieries were closed. Large numbers of people were