Shrewsbury Abbey
The former Shrewsbury Abbey station and platform, seen here on the afternoon of Saturday, 11th December 2021. A delightful surprise as I had no idea there were any remains, indeed I had gone to look at the Abbey itself. Opened by the Potteries, Shrewsbury & North Wales Railway in August 1866, it reached neither the Potteries nor North Wales but ran from here to Llanymynech on the Cambrian Railway's main line south of Oswestry, with a branch from Kinnerley to Criggion stone quarries but the line went bankrupt and closed in 1881. It lay derelict until Col. Holman F. Stephens rebuilt it under the Light Railways Act of 1896 and it reopened in April 1911 as The Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Light Railway. Stephens died in 1931 and passenger services ceased in 1933 although Criggion stone traffic continued. In 1941, the line was taken over by the War Department to serve new ammunition depots in the area. Public passenger services were not re-introduced but workmen's trains ran to the depots and the line was the busiest it had ever been. After WWII, however, the depots began to close and stone traffic from Criggion ceased in December 1959. Dismantling of the line began in 1960 although a link from the Welsh Marches line was put in to Shrewsbury Abbey goods yard, which became an oil depot. Surprisingly, this remained open until 1988 when the last remnant of the S & MLR was abandoned. The building is now a railway bookshop and the platform is used as a footpath to surrounding housing estates but the tracks and the yards have now disappeared beneath a vast car park.
Location: Shrewsbury Abbey (former)
Original line: Potteries, Shrewsbury and North Wales Railway
Photographer: David Bosher
Contact photographer: David Bosher
Photosets: Disused stations (or sites of) in England and Wales (excluding London)
Date: 11/12/2021
Image number: 79431
Other photographs of Shrewsbury Abbey on RailScot
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