Bringing Ashcombe Junction Station Back to Life

For almost half a century, the little station at Ashcombe Junction was a place that most travellers passed without noticing. Closed to passengers in 1966, it was used for a time as a builders' depot, then abandoned altogether, its roof slates stolen and its platform swallowed by brambles. Today, after eleven years of painstaking work by a volunteer trust, it has reopened as the terminus of a heritage line, and visitors arriving for the first time are often surprised by how complete it feels. Almost every structure that stood here in the 1890s has either survived or been faithfully rebuilt, and the trust has deliberately kept each one in its original position, so that the station can be read, as one volunteer puts it, like a page from a Victorian timetable.

Most people still approach the way passengers always did, from Station Road, which runs along the southern edge of the site. Between the road and the station building lies the forecourt, a broad cobbled space where carriages once turned and set down their passengers. Motorists are directed to the car park at the eastern end of the site, beyond the forecourt, rather than onto the cobbles themselves, which were relaid by hand using stone recovered from a demolished mill. Towards the eastern side of the forecourt stands a modest timber cab shelter, in which the drivers of horse-drawn cabs waited for trains to arrive. The original was burnt down in the 1970s, but a local carpenter reconstructed it from photographs, even copying the pattern of the iron hooks on which the drivers hung their coats. On the opposite side of the forecourt, in the south-western corner of the site, is the old coal yard, where merchants once weighed and bagged coal delivered by rail; it now serves as an overflow area on busy event days.

The station building itself is a long, single-storey range of yellow brick facing the forecourt. At its centre is the Booking Hall, the only part of the building with a double-height ceiling, through which every passenger had to pass on the way to the trains. Immediately to the west of the Booking Hall, and connected to it by a hatch, is the parcels office, where everything from baskets of racing pigeons to crates of rhubarb was once recorded in heavy ledgers before being loaded onto the trains. On the other side of the Booking Hall lies the refreshment room, which has been returned to its Edwardian appearance and serves tea from an enormous copper urn. The eastern end of the range is occupied by Station House, the former home of the stationmaster and his family, which the trust now lets to its resident warden.

Behind the building, and running almost the full width of the site, is the platform, resurfaced in its original blue engineering brick. From its edge, visitors look north across the main line, a single track that once carried express trains between the coast and the industrial towns inland. The structures on the far side of the track can be reached only on guided tours, using a supervised crossing at the western end. Nearest to that crossing is the Goods Shed, a cavernous brick structure where wagons were unloaded under cover. A short distance east of the shed rises the water tower, a cast-iron tank on brick piers from which thirsty locomotives were refilled; it still holds water today, although it is now filled by an electric pump rather than from the stream that originally supplied it. At the far eastern end of the line, on the same northern side, is the signal box, its windows set high so that the signalman could see trains approaching from either direction.

Rebuilding these structures raised difficult questions. Should a building be restored to the moment it was first opened, or to the busiest point in its working life? The trust chose the years around 1895, when the station handled more traffic than at any other time, and this decision governed everything from the colour of the paintwork to the lettering of the enamel signs. Where original materials could not be found, the volunteers tracked down substitutes from similar sites across the region, and in a few cases, notably the lever frame used to work the signals, they persuaded engineering apprentices at a nearby college to manufacture exact copies of missing parts.

The result is not simply a museum but a working station. On summer weekends, steam trains run every hour, and costumed volunteers sell tickets, sort parcels and pour tea. Some critics argue that such recreations present the past too tidily, smoothing over the dirt and long hours endured by the people who once worked here. The trust takes the point seriously: a small exhibition now tells the story of the porters, many of whom started work at fourteen, and of the wartime years when women ran the station almost single-handedly. Visitors, it seems, appreciate the honesty, and numbers have risen every year since the station reopened.