Parkway: Station heralded new

IF you were to compile a list of the most boring und unglamorous places around these parts, then Bristol Parkway railway station would be somewhere near the top.

Many Bristolians will also tell you that if you’ve had to drag yourself there to commute or take a work trip to London at 7am on a Monday morning, it can be the most depressing place on Earth. (All the more so, old-timers will add, if you had to do it before the smart new station building opened in 2001.)

Before 2001 you could either wait for the train on a windswept platform looking like an uncompleted tin shed with a few bus shelters with uncomfortable seats in, or you could sit - more likely stand - in a cramped, yellow-lit waiting room with a small snack bar and newspaper stall in one corner.

But dull old Bristol Parkway, which is 50 years old this week, played a very important role in the development of Bristol over recent decades. What’s more, its opening was a hugely important turningpoint in the development of the UK rail system ever since.

When Bristol Parkway was built at a shoestring cost of £200,000 and opened on May 1 1972, it was the first completely new railway station in England after years of railway closures.

The notorious Beeching cuts of the 1960s had given way to a more nuanced idea of how people could, should or would travel and Bristol Parkway would become the first in a whole new generation of stations integrating car and rail travel.

(According to a letter in the Feb 5 edition of BT, the idea of turning the former marshalling yards at Stoke Gifford into a station was “sold” to British Rail bigwigs and a government minister and his entourage by taking them on a train trip past the area and ensuring they were liberally supplied with booze. That’s the story, anyway …)

It came complete with 600 free parking spaces (parking charges didn’t come in until the 1990s) and was deliberately designed to take traffic off the M4 and induce people to travel to London by train instead.

The car parking suggests that’s

Parkway was a key early destination for BR’s new High Speed Trains. BT reader Brian Blestowe kindly sent us this picture he took of one of the early services in the mid-1970s

British Rail advert,

1973. Much of the advertising for BR’s Inter-City services gave the comfort and convenience of rail travel the hard sell, and as the small print in this one pointed out, you could get from Parkway to Paddington in just an hour and 33 minutes. Just enough time for a couple of full English breakfasts

…

how it got its “Parkway” name, though that’s not the case.

“Parkway” was suggested by a member of the public in a British Rail contest to find a name, and came from an early designation of the nearby M32 motorway which was then being built to run from the M4 into central Bristol.

Since then, a number of other stations around the country have had the suffix “Parkway” added to their names to intimate that they perform a similar function. But Bristol Parkway was the first.

And love it or hate it, Bristol Parkway also played a huge part in the massive development to the north

Princess Margaret arrives for a visit at Parkway in 1977

And a visit from Her Majesty in 1978 of th bec offic ther you hou

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