Berwyn railway station

The Llangollen to Corwen railway was opened in 1865. The route was constructed by Thomas Brassey under the direction of the prolific Scottish engineer, Henry Robertson. Berwyn was the first stop for westbound trains after Llangollen. Although today's station is located within a wooded gorge with only few houses and a riverside hotel nearby, it was at the centre of a vibrant community including a post office and Methodist chapel in the Victorian period. However, it was the local gentry who were the main reason for the station's existence. The chairman of the Llangollen and Corwen Railway lived just up the road at Plas Berwyn and an 1861 agreement announced:

A station to be called The Berwyn Station shall be built in ornamental style and contain a first class waiting room in addition to the general waiting room. All passenger trains shall stop at Berwyn if and when required by the owner or occupier of, or visitors to, Plas Berwyn mansion.

Berwyn station was built with a single right-handed curved side platform, station master's house, waiting room and booking office. As the station was too remote to be supplied by coal gas, its interiors were decorated with elaborate oil and paraffin lamps.

As milk was an important part of the local economy, it was regularly put on to trains at Berwyn. Local farms would bring milk to the station in tall, heavy conical metal churns (generally with a capacity of 17 imp gal (77 L; 20 US gal)). Two side handles allowed two men to lift the churns into a goods van. They could be rolled along on their bottom rims by one man, making a distinctive rattling noise. Milk churns would arrive at Berwyn every day from the nearby farms at Llantysilio for transport to the creamery at Corwen.

During the First World War, local teenage conscripts wrote their names and messages in indelible pencil on the wall of a pedestrian tunnel beneath Berwyn station in 1915. They did this shortly before boarding trains that would take them to their battalions. In 2007, research was undertaken to find out who they were. At least one young man is known to have died on the Western Front, and his name is now on the Llangollen War memorial.[4] Work is now underway to protect the surviving messages from water damage.[5]

Berwyn station on the abandoned Ruabon–Barmouth line in September 1967

By the 1950s, the waiting room and booking office had both been closed as Berwyn had become an unstaffed halt. The final scheduled passenger service between Llangollen and Bala Junction ran on 12 December 1964. Goods traffic continued on the eastbound section of line between Ruabon to Llangollen goods yard until 1968. After closure, the whole line was lifted. In the early 1970s, the Langollen Railway Society was formed with the intention of reopening part of the line as a heritage railway.

By the 1980s, the newly relaid heritage line approached the former GWR station. Restoration work then began on the station dilapidated buildings. The first passenger train from Llangollen to return to Berwyn was a DMU on 19 October 1985. Steam hauled services began operating to Berwyn in December the same year. The station received a full passenger service in March 1986, with a formal opening ceremony being performed by the Duke of Westminster on 13 June 1986. As the station had become the western terminus of the new line, a run-round loop was installed just past the station.

The six-arch stone-built Berwyn Viaduct is a Grade II listed building directly to the west of the original station,[6] and now forms part of the station as the platform extends over most of the viaduct's length. The viaduct lies between the River Dee and the A5 road. In addition to crossing a steep-sided valley it also forms a bridge over the B5103 (which crosses the Dee on another viaduct at a lower elevation) and the unnamed brook draining from the north side of Vivod mountain.[7]

Berwyn station originally had a relatively short platform but with an increase in summer services in the early Edwardian period, the platform was extended across the viaduct with timber decking on wrought iron frames. This unusual cantilevered platform at the western end of the station was dismantled in the late 1950s due to its deterioration and a lack of passengers. In 2003 the Llangollen Railway decided to restore the platform at Berwyn to its original extended length across the viaduct which required significant repair work to restore the drainage system and platform supports. The work, which cost £353,000, was completed in March 2004. The platform restoration received a civil engineering award from the Institution of Civil Engineers.[8]

• Butt, R. V. J. (October 1995). The Directory of Railway Stations: details every public and private passenger station, halt, platform and stopping place, past and present (1st ed.). Sparkford: Patrick Stephens Ltd. ISBN 978-1-85260-508-7. OCLC 60251199. OL 11956311M.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Berwyn railway station.

• Lawton, Paul (2010). Berwyn Memories.
• Mitchell, Vic; Smith, Keith (2010). Ruabon to Barmouth. West Sussex: Middleton Press. figs. 29-33. ISBN 9781906008840. OCLC 651922152.

• Berwyn station on navigable 1946 O.S. map