YOUNG ALHS
Abergavenny's lost
railway
Have you noticed that on Brecon Road there is Old Station Surgery, the Railway Inn and The Station Hotel, but there is no sign of a station or a railway line?
This is because Old Station Surgery is where the Brecon Road Station used to be. The Merthyr, Tredegar and Abergavenny Railway used to run through Abergavenny and join the main line to Hereford near to the Lunatic Asylum, now Pen-y-fal.
The line from Merthyr opened in 1862 and used the line of the old tram-road track, (which used horses to pull the wagons) but they built a new bridge over the Usk. Visit the mural in St John’s Street to see how it would have been looked.
It isn’t easy to follow the route that the railway took from the bridge over the river, but it went up past Kingdom Come, then over the bottom of Chapel Road on a bridge to take it to where the surgery stands now. Then it went around the edge of the town and the lunatic asylum to join the Hereford railway line near the long gone Junction Station. If you look at the National Library of Scotland map - https://maps.nls.uk/view/102340044 – and zoom in, you should be able to see where the line went. Is your house on this map?
Images: WW2 Evacuees arriving at Brecon Road station – Sally Davis
The 2012 Diamond Jubilee mural in St John’s Street - ALHS
Abergavenny Junction Station - Mr Derek William Winkworth, Coflein.gov.uk
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