Shropshire Routes to Roots

3. Dreaming of rails

The Shrewsbury, Oswestry and Chester Junction Railway Company and The North Wales Mineral Railway Company joined forces in 1846 to form The Shrewsbury and Chester Railway Company. Despite having the name Oswestry in the original company name the town did not have a station, the nearest was some two miles away at Gobowen. Read part of The Act of Parliament of 1845 that was passed to allow the building of the railway.

Nearly but not quite

Rail companies were looking to build lines through Mid Wales to link to the important rail towns of Crewe, Manchester and beyond. They saw profit in building links with Newtown via Oswestry and then on to the South Wales sea ports with the added bonus of bringing South Wales steam coal back into the industrial north. After many acrimonious years the Great Western Railway Company swallowed up The Shrewsbury and Chester and part of the London and North Western companies and the link to South Wales was not built. But the idea did not go away.

The rails arrive

The Cambrian Station Building under construction Larger image, in a new window [53kb] [Reproduced with kind permission of Shropshire Newspapers]

The Shrewsbury and Chester Railway (later the GWR) opened its branch line from Gobowen to Oswestry on January 1st 1849. This was to become Oswestry's busiest line, even though the journey only took eight minutes. In 1855 The Oswestry and Newtown Railway was proposed, with future extension to Carmarthen and Milford Haven, to open up the 'Gateway to America.' After many acrimonious disputes, many over money, trains were operating between Newtown and Oswestry by summer 1861. One dispute centered around a woman shareholder and landowner who refused to have the railway near her home.

The rails never did make it as far as Milford Haven, because, among other things, other companies were making links to the west and north and out to the coast. This was part of a railway building frenzy in Mid Wales in the second half of the 19th century, with Oswestry playing a pivotal role in most of it.

A grand opening ceremony

R.W Kidner writes of the Opening Ceremony on 4th August 1857 at Welshpool for the Oswestry and Newtown railway thus:

"At the birth of the O. N. the great guns of Powis Castle ... boomed forth; there was a solemn invocation of the Almighty by Archdeacon Clive, and a place was found in the procession, behind the cavalry and between the Mayor and the Board of Directors, for the wheelbarrow to be used by Lady Watkins Williams-Wynn: no common wheelbarrow, but of solid mahogany emblazoned with the Company Arms."

[Kidner, R. W. 1954 'The Cambrian Railways' The Oakwood Press]

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