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GWR/Western Region Island Platforms


puffingbilly51
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I am in the process of planning a roundy style layout. This will be my first, so I'm keeping it simple. It will be a Western Region single line branch, with an island platform, line diverging into a passing loop each side, and a couple of sidings. Not sure how passengers would access platform, either by a footbridge, off a road bridge or even a subway. Did GWR build subways for a small country station? Would appreciate any suggestions and views please. Gauge will be 00, with 75 code Peco rail.

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12 minutes ago, puffingbilly51 said:

I am in the process of planning a roundy style layout. This will be my first, so I'm keeping it simple. It will be a Western Region single line branch, with an island platform, line diverging into a passing loop each side, and a couple of sidings. Not sure how passengers would access platform, either by a footbridge, off a road bridge or even a subway. Did GWR build subways for a small country station? Would appreciate any suggestions and views please. Gauge will be 00, with 75 code Peco rail.

We had a similar request a couple of months ago. The GW did not really do island platforms on branch lines.

 

But look up St Agnes.

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Westbury (I know not really a small country station) has your island platforms and subways. However unless your station is built on an embankment then a footbridge would be far more likely than the subway. 

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Churn Halt on the DN&S (which many might not regard as a branch line) - access from a foot crossing.  Double line.

   

Shiplake, Henley Branch,  island platform with footpath access at one end, level crossing at the other end plus a footbridge.  Originally a single line crossing station on a single line, then c4.5 years later the line was doubled, then c.55 years after that the line was singled and it again became a crossing station and finally  c.10 years after that the crossing loop was removed loop.  Two sidings in the (small) yard until freight facilities were finally withdrawn.  Original platforms still wholly intact, buildings long demolished

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The station I have planned is of a similar size to St. Agnes. Liking the idea of foot (barrow) crossing at one end of the platform. Could also be a foot access to the small yard, which will have a couple of sidings. 

Would there be a warning sign to passengers at this crossing either exiting platform or accessing it?

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The few examples I can think of were all located on lines to Newquay! On the Par line Bugle and Luxulyan were island platforms - I think developed from single platforms as the traffic grew. At Bugle the access was by stairs from a road bridge. At Luxulyan it was a foot crossing, and the actual station building wasn’t on the platform!

 

On the Chacewater line, which was built by the GWR,  St Agnes had an island platform - it was originally built as a single platform but became an island when it became a passing place. As a result the canopy on the building was reversed (to road side) and the platform side blocked off. Access to the platform was by footbridge. 
Further along the line Perranporth was built as an island platform, with subway access. 

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Perranporth, access from road in under-bridge, via steps up to the platform I think, so bordering on a subway.

 

EDIT: Snap!

 

EDIT: The station had closed, and most of it had been demolished, when I saw it during a holiday, and I can't remember the details precisely ........ it might have been a pedestrian underpass, rather than a road, that the steps to the platform led up from.

Edited by Nearholmer
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Treforest Estate station - on a dark winter's Saturday morning, at the back of an Industrial Estate that was mainly closed on Saturdays, along an unlit country lane, through a seemingly dark, endless 'tunnel' and up wet slippery steps to wait on a barren, poorly lit platform hoping that the only stopper 'up' of the day hadn't already been and gone (no stoppers for going home though), and that the driver saw you flagging him (stopped by request only on Saturdays) - did that for five years in the late 70s :scared:. In the five years, not one other person caught that train with me.

 

If you want a modern look to the station, it has all been refurbished with matrix information boards, good lighting and shelters. Seemingly trains stop there frequently too. (Videos on YouTube).

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

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9 hours ago, Philou said:

Treforest Estate station - on a dark winter's Saturday morning, at the back of an Industrial Estate that was mainly closed on Saturdays, along an unlit country lane, through a seemingly dark, endless 'tunnel' and up wet slippery steps to wait on a barren, poorly lit platform hoping that the only stopper 'up' of the day hadn't already been and gone (no stoppers for going home though), and that the driver saw you flagging him (stopped by request only on Saturdays) - did that for five years in the late 70s :scared:. In the five years, not one other person caught that train with me.

 

If you want a modern look to the station, it has all been refurbished with matrix information boards, good lighting and shelters. Seemingly trains stop there frequently too. (Videos on YouTube).

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

Locals still speak in hushed tones of the phantom menace of the platform, Philou. said to be harbinger of doom...  It was blacker than the inside of a cow in those days, and Gilfach Fargoed and Cefn Onn, our other requests, were no better.  Did you flag the train down with a cigarette lighter; this was the practice at Cefn Onn.  it is all still there under the brambles and bushes, closed when Thornhill for Lisvane replaced it, but in my imagination the ghost of the bloke who got on the first Rhymni there who worked a night shift at the British Gas depot in the old RR carriage shed still waves his lighter at the ghost of the first Rhymni every morning.  

 

The tunnel is, as everyone know, haunted by the 3 navvies bricked up inside it, killed when hitting a spring caused a collapse and too buried to be retrieved for proper burial, so their unquiet spirits roam the tunnel, still seen occasionally.  I saw one myself on a first Rhymni on a cold Monday morning once; it turned out to be an icicle hanging from one of the ventilator shafts. 

 

The spring, like the Great Spring in the Severn Tunnel, is still running, unaffected by drought or rainfall, this is ancient groundwater that probably began accumulating in the Carboniferous.  It runs in a leet alongside the line from the tunnel mouth down to Llanishen, on the west side, and at Llanishen follows the pathway between Lisvane Road and the Two Arches for a short way before diverting in to the headwaters of Nant Fawr (Roath Park Brook to you) and feeding the Llanishen Reservoirs where I learned to sail dingies, these reservoirs being built by the RR who sold the water to Guest Keen's East Moors steelworks when it was built.  The leet is a very good place for brown trout, smaller but far tastier than rainbows and you can't even get decent tasting rainbows any more, only farmed Vietnamese rubbish (not complaining about them being Vietnamese, complaining about them being farmed; they just don't taste as good as wild fish.  Wild trout with crushed walnut and garlic butter stuffing; now you're talking!).  And you can't get done for poaching because you can't buy a permit for the leet; you can of course be 'ad up for trespassing on the railway, if you survive...

 

Learning to sail dingies on Llanishen Reservoirs was fun; I did it in the 80s after a Jobcentre volunteer scheme to build one at Gladstone School, which I stayed on with after the funding ran out off my own bat because I was enjoying it; the sailing school allowed my to take a boat out if there was a spare to join the paying customers as a sort of quid pro quo, which continued with me helping to get the boats out and put them away again and being a general dogsbody until I had a major falling out with the Naval Commander type guy running the joint who had a low opinion of 'benefit freeloaders' (the people who had built his latest dingy free for him, and were helping to run his sailing centre as volunteers, incidentally).  The instructors were a pair of women of a sapphic persuasion who were really good fun; we would go up the Church in Llanishen village for beer afterwards.  

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Straightaway I also thought 'St Agnes', post its 1937 rebuild. Often thought about doing this one myself, I like the unusual but compact layout and the scenic block overbridge at one end. And unlike Perranporth which has totally disappeared, the station building at St Agnes still exists, AFAIK, if this would be helpful.

 

If the prospect of running china clay trains through St Agnes sounds appealing, you could apply a healthy dose of modeller's licence and bend history. Page 12 of the Late Summer 1992 issue of 'Great Western Railway Journal', which was a Special Cornish Issue, has a May 1935 photo of St Erth station with a china clay dry located inside the curve onto the St Ives branch. The caption says, "The clay drys.........had belonged to the Porthia China Clay Co. but the clay industry never really got established in West Cornwall." One could pretend that it did get established and due to main line capacity issues clay trains were routed onto the less busy Chacewater - Newquay line to link up with other clay traffic at St Dennis Junction. This would assume that Blackwater and Tolcarn Junctions had remained complete triangles.

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9 hours ago, Philou said:

No, no cigarette lighter as I had no use for one - just my hand, if it hadn't frozen off in the morning cold. I don't think the sun ever shone on the platform ..................

It must have; the site is open to the north east and must have been sunlit on summer mornings, but I can't recall it ever being bright or sunny there; it was just bleak!

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Good mentions of the Cornish stations above. Have a look at the Cornwall Railway Society's website for photos, which should give you some ideas.

 

http://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/cornwall-galleries.html

 

Edit: as Miss Prism has already pointed out.

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It all  depended on the lay of the land and who engineered the line.  The GWR took over a lot of lines built by smaller independent companies and didn't as a general rule build lines along essentially flat landscape.   Most sensible people built railway stations adjacent to roads.   Stations were often built where railway and road crossed, sometimes where road and railway platform were at the same level.  Island platforms could be on embankments,  Corwen 2020, accessed by subway or in a cutting, Cheltenham Malvern Road by footbridge from buildings to one side of the running lines.    The Odd ball ones had the tracks at road level, with an Island, which made little sense.  If I did one with the platform at baseboard level neither in a cutting or on an embankment I would make platform access off a level crossing at the platform end like Grosmont on the NYMR,  with the Station building to one side and a simple waiting shelter on the platform, but these level ground Island platforms were rare at small stations.   

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The largest Island of them all:- Pontypridd.  Abercynon, perchance?  Pontypool Road? Not really branch lines, however. The down platform at Llandaff is technically an island platform. 

 

Pant Station; still in (sort of) use by the Brecon Mountain Railway.

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