History of the SVR

Opened in 1862 after a nine-year building project, the Severn Valley Railway was originally part of the much longer Shrewsbury to Hartlebury line. The original line contained 15 stations. The Bewdley to Kidderminster section, or loop line, was constructed by the GWR, who ran many of the railways in the area, and opened in June 1878.

The line was never the busiest, largely because it had been laid as a single-track line for the economy. Although several passing loops were added later, the limited capacity meant that it could never aspire to regular through traffic from stations and industries outside of the Severn Valley, and so only saw local passenger and goods traffic. Fortunately, there were several coalfields in the area that used the Railway to transport their coal to nearby power stations and further afield.

In 1948, the government nationalised the railways and the Severn Valley line passed to the newly-formed British Railways (BR). The following decade saw many of steam-hauled passenger trains replaced by diesel units. Traffic had been in decline since the 1920s, and in the early 1960s BR announced the line was ‘suspected of being unremunerative.’ Although plans to close the line began as early as 1961 and all passenger services stopped in 1963, a mere two years later a plan to save the Severn Valley line began in a pub – as most good things do!