Bewdley’s first railway scheme was drawn up in 1801, and it would not have saved the town either. The proposal was for a tramway from Wribbenhall to the canal basins at Kidderminster, laid partly along the main Kidderminster road. It never got past initial planning, and the Severn Valley Railway’s own historians make the point that it would not have made Bewdley a rival to Stourport in any case, because goods would have had to be transhipped at Kidderminster as well as at the river, wasting the time the whole exercise was meant to save.
Then forty-five years of nothing. In 1846 the Shropshire Union Canal engaged Robert Stephenson to prepare a plan for a railway linking Shrewsbury with Worcester, and that was dropped too.
Getting it built
The Severn Valley Railway Company was formed in 1852 and got its Act of Parliament in 1853, with a second Act in 1855 for changes to the route. The main change near Bewdley was at Mount Pleasant, where the original line towards Stourport was replaced by a shorter one through a tunnel of 124 yards.
Construction began in the summer of 1858, by which time the intended engineer, Robert Nicholson, had died. John Fowler took over, a man who would go on to the Forth Bridge and the Metropolitan Railway, though as was usual much of the actual work was carried out by his assistant, Henry Orlando Bridgeman. The Mount Pleasant tunnel was begun in August 1859. In December that year the keystones went into the main arch of Wribbenhall viaduct.
It cost people. In January 1860 a scaffold collapse in the tunnel badly injured a labourer. Almost a year later a navvy named James Bishop was killed there, standing too close to a rock blasting, and his death led to a review of working practices. Weeks after that a landslip injured another man. In 1861 the wing retaining wall of the viaduct collapsed and took two workers down with it, and by good fortune both were only slightly hurt.
The first train through Bewdley ran in May 1861 and was a contractor’s ballast working. The line opened officially on 31 January 1862, with ordinary trains from the following day.
A 999-year lease that lasted two days
The ownership of the thing is worth a paragraph on its own. The station was built for the Severn Valley Railway Company, but before the line was even finished the company was effectively absorbed by the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, which signed a 999-year lease on the route on 14 June 1860.
Two days later the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton became the West Midland Railway Company, and it was the West Midland that actually first ran trains through Bewdley. In 1863 the West Midland was dissolved in its turn, and Bewdley became Great Western.
Two junctions, one of them called useless
Bewdley became a junction almost immediately. The Tenbury and Bewdley Railway opened to the public on 13 August 1864, running alongside the Severn Valley line north for two miles before curving west across the three seventy-foot spans of Dowles Bridge and away through Wyre Forest, Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Newnham Bridge to Tenbury, and on to Woofferton Junction.
The second junction was the Kidderminster loop, meant to run trains from the valley into Kidderminster without reversing at Hartlebury. It was proposed in 1860 and had an Act by 1861, then sat unbuilt while the Severn Valley line itself was being finished. Daniel Gooch, of the Great Western, once dismissed the section as a “useless curve”. It was begun anyway in 1874 under the contractor Charles Dickinson, the main works were finished in March 1878, and the Board of Trade then insisted on alterations that pushed the opening back to 1 June that year.
The station you can walk round today
Almost everything you see at Bewdley station was put there for that second junction. A pair of new signal boxes went up in 1877 and 1878, the track was reconfigured so that the lines through platforms 1 and 2 worked as a stretch of double-track main line, and the island platform was extended at both ends. The footbridge was built then, so that passengers stopped crossing the rails at ground level as they had done for sixteen years. The northern end of the canopy, the one with the wooden frame, dates from the remodelling; the southern end came later and has a steel frame. The turntable was lost in the process.
Two later details are worth looking for. In 1954 the upper portions of the North Signal Box were raised bodily by one foot. And on platforms 2 and 3 there is an open-roofed cast-iron gentlemen’s urinal that did not start life here at all: it was brought from Melrose in Scotland and restored and installed by volunteers. There is small dog’s-head detailing on the outside walls.
Why it never mattered as much as it should have
The line was laid as single track for economy. Passing loops were added later, but the capacity was never there for regular through traffic from beyond the valley, so it carried local passengers and local goods and not much else. What kept it busy was coal, from the several coalfields in the area, going to power stations and further afield.
Meanwhile the reason Bewdley had wanted a railway in the first place had gone. The trade left the quay for Stourport in the 1770s. The railway arrived in 1862, ninety years too late to reverse it, and what it actually brought the town was the first leisure visitors.
The long ending, and it is later than people think
The railways were nationalised in 1948 and the line passed to British Railways. Traffic had been declining since the 1920s, and in the early 1960s British Railways described the line as “suspected of being unremunerative”, which is a remarkable way to condemn something.
The Tenbury passenger services went first, ceasing on 1 August 1962. The Shrewsbury to Bewdley section closed to passengers in 1963. That date gets quoted as the end of Bewdley’s railway, and it is not.
Bewdley kept its connection to Stourport and Kidderminster after 1963. Freight kept the Tenbury line going for a while longer, helped by traffic off the Ditton Priors light railway that joined it at Cleobury Mortimer. Coal trains from Alveley Colliery worked between what is now Country Park Halt and Bewdley until 1969. When that traffic stopped the station’s fate was settled, and despite local objections all traffic ceased on Saturday 3 January 1970.
Coming back
By then the section from Bridgnorth to Hampton Loade was already running as a preserved railway, and the closure of Bewdley was exactly the stimulus needed to push south. The society bought the route from Hampton Loade to just beyond Bewdley tunnel in 1971, and two years after that moved the preserved line’s headquarters to Bewdley.
The station reopened for business on 18 May 1974, four years and four months after the last train. The locomotive pit and water tanks came into use that winter. The line was extended to Kidderminster in 1984. There is BBC film of a day trip up the line from Bewdley to Bridgnorth in 1981, which catches it between those two dates.
Work has not stopped since. A range of brick outbuildings south of the station house was replaced with an office extension in 1998. In 2002 the decaying enamel British Rail lamps came out, replaced with Windsor Pattern fittings more in keeping with the 1920s look the station is held at.
So the railway came to Bewdley ninety years too late to save the town, closed altogether on a Saturday in January 1970, and was carrying passengers again by the spring of 1974. It is now one of the main reasons anybody gets off a train here at all, which is not what the Severn Valley Railway Company had in mind in 1852.
