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Gloucestershire Business News

New heritage railway station to open on Good Friday

Volunteers on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway (GWSR) are working flat-out to make things ready for the first public train to stop at Broadway station for nearly six decades.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester will signal the opening of the brand new Broadway station on Good Friday (30th March), by unveiling a plaque recognising the achievement of volunteers who have tirelessly resurrected the railway and built the new station on the site of the original.

The first train will be headed by the GWSR's flagship steam locomotive, Great Western Railway-designed Hall class locomotive no. 7903, Foremarke Hall, which will depart at 09.40, bound for Cheltenham Racecourse, more than 14 miles to the south.

The final rails were laid just before Christmas 2017, to complete the link between Broadway and the southern terminus at Cheltenham Racecourse.

The station building has been built using new heritage bricks and materials, so that it looks almost identical to the one that once stood on the site. It even has a riveted (not welded) steel roof and platform canopy superstructure, built to the original 1903 design.

The railway's volunteer chairman, Richard Johnson, says: "British Railways withdrew local train services and closed the original station in March 1960, with the buildings and platforms demolished in 1963.

"Although the line itself, once a vital link between the West Midlands and Wales and the West Country, remained open for through freight and passenger trains, the whole line was closed in 1976 and, by the end of 1979, the track and remaining infrastructure had gone.

"The reopening of the line on 30th March is a huge triumph for the railway's 950 or so volunteers who operate and grow what has become one of the UK's top heritage railways."

Lord Richard Faulkner, who is a patron of the railway, President of the Heritage Railway Association and a parliamentary champion of the economic contribution that heritage railways make to the UK tourist economy, said: "I'm hugely looking forward to the privilege of flagging the first train out of Broadway station, 58 years to the month since the last one departed.

"It underlines what can be achieved by the astonishing determination of well-coordinated and visionary volunteer effort. This is a railway that has come a long way in every sense, since the first moves to preserve it back in 1979.

"These volunteers have rebuilt a former main line that back in the early 1980s, many thought was an impossible dream."

Pictures: Ian Crowder, Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway

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