Llandrindod Wells railway station

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Llandrindod Wells railway station

This station’s opening in October 1865 transformed the local economy. Stagecoaches which took several hours from the nearest large towns or railheads were replaced by spacious trains to Llandrindod. As visitor numbers grew, the town’s population increased tenfold from 1861 to 1914.

By 1881 trains were conveying through coaches to Llandrindod from as far away as London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The town’s hotels sent porters to carry guests’ luggage.

Today the station is the principal stop on the scenic Heart of Wales Line, where the trains run between Swansea and Shrewsbury.

llandrindod_wells_railway_station_lnwrOriginally the Central Wales Railway built a temporary terminus station “on the common”, as this undeveloped area was then known. The London & North Western Railway operated the trains, initially from the junction with the main line at Craven Arms.

The track was extended in stages until in 1868 it connected to the Llanelly Railway. The route had been conceived as a conduit from the deep-water harbour of Milford Haven to the textile mills of Manchester.

Llandrindod’s goods yard, west of the station, handled incoming supplies for the expanding town and outward-bound produce from the countryside. In 1889 the LNWR was ordered to compensate a Cardiff company for damage to a portable steam engine which had been loaded onto a wagon here. There was no loading gauge (to check the heights of loaded wagons) and the train got only as far as Penybont before the portable engine struck a bridge. The engine’s damage was valued at £40 – about £5,000 in today’s money.

The railway’s infrastructure was scaled back after the Second World War to reduce operating costs. Llandrindod lost its station canopies, visible in the old photo (courtesy of the Radnorshire Museum). Platform 2 became derelict, but reopened in 1986. The glass canopy you now see on Platform 1 was previously at the Pump House Hotel, demolished in the 1980s. The redundant signal box was moved to Platform 1 in 1990.

Postcode: LD1 5BB    View Location Map

Heart of Wales Line website

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