Cadoxton railway station

History

The station here was built & opened by the Barry Railway in December 1888 and was busy from the outset due to its proximity to both Biglis Junction, where the company's main line from Trehafod Junction (in the Rhondda Valley) via Wenvoe (opened in 1889) joined the branch along the coastal plain from Cogan Junction & Cardiff Central, and also to the newly commissioned, rail-served Barry Docks complex. A major yard (with more than 30 sidings) at the junction was built in the early 1890s to handle the large numbers of coal trains brought down to the docks for export and the community of Cadoxton soon grew substantially to house the railway workers employed there, which in turn led to increasing levels of passenger traffic using the station. The arrival of the Taff Vale Railway's coastal route from Penarth via Lavernock in 1890, the completion of the branch to Barry Island in 1896 and the opening of the Vale of Glamorgan Line two years after that added even greater volumes of both passengers (mainly holidaymakers to the resort at Barry Island) and goods passing through - by 1910 the docks had surpassed neighbouring Cardiff's as the busiest in South Wales for coal exports and subsequently became the biggest coal export dock (in terms of volume) in the world by 1913.

The majority of passenger services ran from to/from Cardiff (either via the coast and Penarth or directly via Dinas Powys), but the line via the Wenvoe Tunnel was used by trains to & from Porth via Pontypridd Graig from 1896 onwards and the VoG line had a passenger service to/from Bridgend from its opening in 1898. Service frequencies were kept relatively low on the Wenvoe line however in order to accommodate the high volumes of freight, with six trains per day each way the standard frequency (except on summer Saturdays) for many years.

Traffic levels declined significantly after World War II, with road competition leading to a significant drop in usage on all of the routes serving the station, especially in the summer months. This led to British Railways closing many of the routes to passengers in the 1960s - the Pontypridd line was the first to go in September 1962, whilst the Vale of Glamorgan (June 1964) and Penarth (May 1968) lines both fell victim to the Beeching Axe, leaving only the Cardiff to Barry Island line still open. Of the three that lost their passenger trains, only the Bridgend line now remains (having been reopened to passengers in 2005) - the other two were closed completely & lifted by the end of the decade. The yard also suffered a similar fate, with the sidings dismantled after the abandonment of the Wenvoe 'main line' in March 1963 and the site subsequently redeveloped for housing. The decline in routes serving the station has had a consequent effect on the layout here, with only two of the four original platforms now in use.

Some freight traffic bound for the remaining rail-connected parts of the docks still passes through (such as containers & scrap steel) along with that heading further west (e.g. automotive parts for the Ford factory at Bridgend & bulk coal bound for Aberthaw Power Station), but many of the flows that once ran to the docks have now ceased (such as the ICI chemical tank trains from Burn Naze and Baglan Bay which ended in the late 1990s).

Services

Monday to Saturday daytimes there is a 15-minute frequency northbound to Cardiff Central and beyond (Aberdare & Merthyr Tydfil).< Southbound there are 3 trains per hour to Barry Island and an hourly service to Bridgend via Rhoose.

Evenings and Sundays there is a generally a half-hourly service to Cardiff Central. In the evenings there is an hourly service southbound to Barry Island and Bridgend whilst on Sundays, it is half-hourly to Barry Island and every two hours to Bridgend.