The Southport-Preston axis (which I must confess to have never used) has always struck me as operationally very cumbersome with a mixture of steam and electric services, complicated triangular junctions at both ends with numerous variations of services onto adjoining lines and links to depots. Plus the usual problems of multiple level crossings, seasonal surges in traffic and so on. Loads of money to be saved.
Although I've seen the 'two million' figure before (albeit applied to the whole route, not just the electrified section) I struggle to believe it. All the pictures that I've seen of Crossens and other intermediate stations seem to be virtually bereft of passengers, certainly in later days. Crossens station itself lay on the edge of a relatively small community with open fields to one side of the line.
As a pleasant set of suburbs on the north side of a reasonably well-to-do town the area out to Crossens must have been in the vanguard of rapidly rising car ownership and easy to serve by bus in the early 1960s.
Are there any more details of the patronage?
The actual closure of the line seemed to pass of with remarkably little attention. The Railway Magazine for October 1964 simply lists the stations on the line as closing along with dozens of others across the network around that time (whereas the demise of railbus services on various remote deep rural byways around the same time usually got a photo feature).