West Somerset and S&D Trust settle Washford station dispute
WEST Somerset Railway plc has reached agreement with the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust which two years ago was given a year’s notice to quit its long-time home of Washford station.
The trust sought legal advice after officials received a formal solicitors’ letter terminating the 50-year tenancy agreed in 2018 because the railway wanted to use the site for its own purposes.
Subsequent prolonged negotiations between the plc and the trust over the future of the station concluded on January 20, it was announced.
Under the new agreement, the trust has given up both the station and signalbox but will continue to occupy the rest of the site, including the buildings and yard, until November 23, 2023.
As previously reported, the trust has already moved several items of rolling stock to the Mid-Hants Railway and is to relocate other exhibits to to Bitton on the Avon Valley Railway, where a museum is being established on what was part of the LMS route that led to the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway at Bath Green Park. The trust’s collection of museum artefacts will be placed on long-term display at the Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust’s Midsomer Norton base, and its Somerset peat railway exhibit has been moved to the Westonzoyland pumping station near Bridgwater. Some wagons and the goods shed crane from Binegar have gone on loan to the North Dorset Railway project at Shillingstone.
Following the agreement, the trust is drawing up plans to relocate many more of its items, including its three carriages, from Washford.
WSR plc chairman Jonathan Jones-Pratt said: “We are pleased and hugely relieved that the negotiations regarding the immediate future of the Washford site have been concluded.”
The station was closed last year. However, Jonathan said: “We are now recruiting a team for the WSR plc to manage the station and hope it will be up and running again as soon as possible, but certainly by the start of the coming season and first public trains on Saturday, March 19.
“Volunteers to work on the station will always be welcome and anyone interested is invited to contact our volunteer co-ordinator at volunteers@wsrail.net
“We have not yet made a final decision regarding future use of the whole site, but there is a range of important demands on future accommodation which will now be reviewed in detail to allow the best use of the site in WSR’s best interests. We will also discuss asset removal with the trust, such as track, buildings and so on, and will explore if there are any purchase opportunities.”
Trust chairman Ian Young said: “I could easily use words like ‘end of the beginning’ and ‘chapters in a story’, and all of these have a bearing on where we find ourselves.”
The trust has its origins in the closure of the Somerset & Dorset system on January 1, 1966, when a group of like-minded people formed the Somerset & Dorset Circle. Two years later they voted to buy No. 53808 from Barry scrapyard and lease the station buildings and Up platform at Radstock North from BR. From 1972 onwards, industrial tank engines were used to haul brake van trips a mile along the former S&D main line to Writhlington colliery, and the following year the circle became the Somerset & Dorset Railway Museum Trust. A separate Somerset & Dorset Light Railway Company failed to raise funds to buy the station and was wound up in December 1976.
Alternative homes for the trust were considered, and it was invited by the nascent WSR to take over the then-derelict station in 1976.
Since then, it has transformed it into a museum. No. 53808 was moved there in 1977.