Our tiniest station at Eardington is something of a gem on the Severn Valley line. Trains only stop here during special events, and it’s always a popular attraction. It’s the only station in the UK that’s lit entirely by oil and paraffin, and has never had mains electricity. Eardington station’s dedicated team of volunteers works hard all year round, and recently they’ve embarked on an ambitious project to build an authentic reconstruction of a former station building. Station master, Steve Downs, sends this blog post: 

We’ve been busy starting the construction of a replica goods lock-up just north of the station building, and it’s sited right on the footprint of the original building! 

 Getting this right has taken a bit of detective work, and for me, it’s a bit of an obsession. I’ve been researching the history of the station since a small team of us began tidying it up around 1984. We were then already SVR volunteers, from the carriage and wagon workshop in Bridgnorth.  

We first learnt about the goods lock-up from a lovely old local resident called Bill Stacey, who’s sadly no longer with us. He was a real character, one of the last of the old countrymen around here. He told us it used to be a tin shed with a curved roof. He grew up around here in the 1930s, and remembered it.

One day we decided to start excavating the area where it sat, which had been buried by a landslide in 1990. We dug a little hole and found what appeared to be the edge of the foundations. Half a dozen of us used shovels and wheelbarrows to move somewhere between 20 and 30 tonnes of spoil, and as we dug it out, the footprint of the original building was revealed. So, Bill Stacey was right! 

When we’ve finished, the building will be fitted out as a 1930s Goods Lock Up complete with suitcases, parcels and farm deliveries. We want to give a flavour of the working life of a small wayside station and to show how country branch lines were at the centre of the local community in the days before online shopping and ‘white van man’.