WALLINGFORD: A NEW ASHBURTON?
50years ago, 1971 witnessed one of the greatest victories in railway preservation – namely the return of main line steam – but also one of its most tragic losses.
On the same day as No. 6000 King George V was setting out on its epic week-long railtour that broke the BR steam ban, two more railtours were heading for the classic Great Western branch terminus of Ashburton – but would mark a sad ending rather than a new beginning.
After those trains left Ashburton, the trackbed of the embryonic Dart Valley Railway from there to Buckfastleigh was buried under the A38 dual carriageway, and one of the best-loved GWR stations in the country was cut off from the railway network, seemingly forever.
Immortalised and instantly recognisable on countless model railways, Ashburton’s fine Brunelian timber train shed would have made the perfect terminus for a preserved railway. But while it’s not impossible that it could one day see a train again, this is – to say the least – one of preservation’s longer-term aspirations.
In the meantime, that infamous wrong has now, to some degree, been righted, and in what many would consider the most unlikely place – Wallingford.
Transformed terminus…
For most of its preservation life, Wallingford station has been, to be frank, a dump. With the original terminus lost to redevelopment a quarter of a mile to the north, when the Cholsey & Wallingford Railway Preservation Society took over the branch, they had no choice but to construct a new station on the site of the former maltings siding whose freight traffic had kept the line alive. But for decades since, it’s consisted of little more than a cluster of portable cabins, lines of rusting rolling stock, and none of the atmosphere you expect from a preserved GWR branch line.
So, the transformation wrought
