 Sources differ on what services used the station in the early 1860s.An authority states that NBR trains used from from opening on 29 October 1861, implying that subsequent NBR services never used the station at Carlisle Canal.The NBR leased the Carlisle and Silloth Bay Railway in 1862 and pursued a lavish, arguably profligate, campaign of investment and overprovision on that line in its battle with the Caledonian to gain access to England, including building a port and, effectively, the railway town of Silloth in the scarcely populated northwest corner of the country.