Railway Heritage in Burnham-on-Sea & Highbridge

The railway came to Burnham in 1858. People sometimes assume that it was another of those annoying dead end branches off the main line that the Great Western Railway was fond of, but it wasn't. 

Highbridge to Burnham was originally part of the Somerset Central Railway. That railway originated in 1854 with a line to link Glastonbury with Highbridge wharf to get freight from one to the other. I suppose most of us think of railways as a means of carrying people but it was freight that sustained the trouble & expense of building them and the loss of that freight to road transport that eventually condemned so many. Highbridge was the Somerset Central's base, with its workshops. Four years later the company decided to try to develop a link to South Wales by extending the line to Burnham & building the jetty, which is still there, so that vessels could get alongside, but still the passengers had to walk from Burnham station which was at that stage in effect the terminus of the main line. 

Where was the station? In 2015 after a good deal of effort by local enthusiasts a set of buffers was put up approximately where the main line ended, though rails also ran down the jetty. The station was to the landward side of those buffers where the road, recently renamed Old Station Approach, now is and the car park was a coal yard. The main line ran away along what is now Marine Drive until it reached what is now Apex Park. The path through the park and out to Highbridge at the other end marks the rest of the line. Those of you who know Highbridge will at once realise that meant the line had to cross the main road, the A38. That it did by a level crossing. What fun it would be to have a level crossing on the A38 today! The line did not at that time run through a park. The lakes in Apex Park are former brick earth pits and there was a brick and tile works there. 

The Somerset Central Railway, pursuing more freight and passengers as all the small and disconnected railways at that time did, agreed that an amalgamation with the Dorset Central railway would be in both their interests, from a line which by this time had got beyond Glastonbury to Evercreech: 24 miles and an hour and ten minutes from Burnham, so the  journey was fairly relaxed. The plan was in due course to be able to run from Burnham down to Poole on the South coast and thus enable traffic from South Wales to France. The Burnham to South Wales shipping service was not popular, and the formation of the Somerset & Dorset was the beginning of a process of linking, new line development and railway amalgamation that to some extent left the Highbridge to Burnham line as a rather remote offshoot of the main operations. At its busiest there were eleven trains daily from Highbridge to Burnham in the Summer in addition to six a day to and from Evercreech Junction and one to and from Wells. The Reed Arms, Pier Hotel and Belmont Hotel all clustered round the station and many passengers stayed in them. The Reed Arms survives still. It was excursion traffic that kept the line open until 1966. Regular passenger services were withdrawn fifteen years earlier. In 1962 John Betjeman made a film entitled Branch Line Railway to support saving the Burnham line and as much as possible of the rest of the Somerset network but without success. 

For many years after the lines were taken up, the old carriage works in Highbridge built over, roads and new housing and a supermarket built, more or less all trace of where the railway to Burnham had been, apart from a reference in the name of The Railway Arms and an odd unbuilt area and unusually wide grass verges towards the seaward end of what was Marine Drive, had vanished. Much of Somerset's former railway network is celebrated, as privately run steam railway such as the West Somerset, cycle track such as The Strawberry Line or in railway museums and other mementos. It seemed a pity that Burnham should not celebrate its part of this heritage: hence the buffers.