Blackpool South Shore Station Demolition

It always happens that the things I should photograph, things that are about to disappear, I never seem to get round to until they either are no longer there or are already smashed to bits.

As witness these photos of Blackpool's South Shore railway station, the buildings of which, when I arrived with camera in hand in March 1985 are well on the way to nothingness... I could also cite the lack of any colour photos of those stocks on wheels I featured a while ago. Long gone by the time I went looking again with some colour film in my camera.

And yet I regularly take photos of things that don't change over and over again. Take a typical town. People take photos of its grand public buildings, town halls, parks etc. Not so much the shops on the High Street. Particularly not the small shops on the High Street. But they are the things that change. They are the photos you can look back on and come over all nostalgic. Stonehenge looks pretty much the same as it did when I were a lad. The stones I mean not the now elaborate entrance and gift shop. You see? The small shops...

So I have no photos of the South Shore station before its demise. No photos of the wonderful model railway set that resided within. #fail as my Twitter friends would say.

South Shore station today is still in use as Blackpool's second terminus. Just a couple of shelters adorn the platforms. The line that comes to it splits from the main route into Blackpool North at Kirkham and stops at Lytham, St Annes and the Pleasure Beach.

Return to Blackpool Town Index Page

Bristol Temple Meads

The other day I had to go to Bristol for a work meeting and took the train. It's a fair chug down from Blackpool to Bristol, involving changes at Preston and Birmingham New Street.

As I got off the train onto the platform at Bristol Temple Meads I thought my luck was in and that a steam train was in the station. It turned out to be a static display of old coaches bearing adverts for the Dartmouth Steam Railway in Devon. This used to be known as the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway so what Paignton have done to be so ignobly dropped from the name I'm not sure - the train still starts from there.

Bristol Temple Meads has an interesting history, being the original western terminus of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway (GWR). The original station has changed a lot, being expanded twice and having extra platforms slotted in when the broad gauge (7 feet and a quarter inch) track originally used by Brunel was converted to standard gauge of four feet eight and a half inches.

It has platforms numbered from 1-15. Passenger trains do not use platform two and platform 14 does not exist. Some of the signage refers to an older platform numbering system. Altogether my sort of station!

Temple Meads refers to a nearby church built originally by the Knights Templars and "Meads" being an old word for meadow - the area around the station was meadow at the time of building.

Large version of the photo: temple meads