clock tower in June 1880. The clock's mechanism was designed by the horologist and lawyer Sir Edmund Beckett and made by Potts of Leeds. Starting in 1967, British Rail embarked on an extensive rebuild of the second station, resulting in the removal of the clock tower and most of the station buildings. The station's decorative and elegant frontage and pavilion roof were demolished and replaced with an austere counterpart. The rebuilt station was "aesthetically inferior to its earlier incarnation, soon proved to be too cramped to cope with a rise in passenger numbers". It was poorly laid out with few opportunities for retail and other services. Infilling the station forecourt to the level of the first-storey platform provided direct access to the Up platform level but there was no level access to the Down platform except via a barrow crossing. Westgate became the main station serving Wakefield because of its location on the main line from Leeds to London. Until the mid-1960s, it had regular services to Bradford Exchange via and Ossett and via Morley Top and also to Castleford via the Methley Joint Railway, but these services fell victim to the Beeching cuts between 1964 and 1966. The station was electrified along with the rest of the Leeds branch of the East Coast Main Line in the late 1980s. During this time the Up (towards Doncaster) through line was removed in order to allow the electrification masts to be erected. Regeneration Improvements to Westgate Station were constrained by a lack of funding. In early 2007 Network Rail announced that a £1.4 million redevelopment scheme was planned for the station to take place by the end of 2009. The scheme was a part of the Westgate Key Development Area authorised by Wakefield Council. The scheme involved constructing offices, leisure, small-scale retail, hotel, restaurants and housing on the site of an old dairy and disused railway goods yards. In 2009, work on the Merchant Gate development commenced and work on the first phase was completed by September 2010. Four years later, Westgate Station was rebuilt at the northern end of the platforms and the former overflow car park. Key aims of the project were nearly doubling station's retail facilities, an improved forecourt area, station management centre, staff offices, a customer information point, a first class waiting room and standard class waiting facilities and the installation of new passenger information technologies and