Plenty of trains race through Pilning Station, and just twice a week one calls there. On 3rd May, the Bristol Rail Campaign walked from Severn Beach to Pilning to join the train at 15:32 headed for Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth and Penzance and around ten of us joined the 5 carriage electric train when it arrived through the Severn Tunnel from South Wales.

Why is the service so thin? Does anyone use it?  Could it be better?

The history

Pilning Station is about a mile from Pilning Village.  It's located where it is because it was an operational centre where the line that descends to the Severn Tunnel forked off from the line to New Passage where the ferry used to run.  Until the opening of the first Severn Bridge in 1966, you could put your car on a train here and have it taken through the tunnel to Severn Tunnel Junction, but that service ceased when the bridge opened.

Train services at this remote station decayed over the years to two trains per day in the 1970s and then to 2 trains per week in 2006. The service ran into Bristol called on a Saturday morning, and one train retuned on that afternoon.

Faced with the cost of raising and improving the footbridge on electrification in 2016, Network Rail and their contractors simply removed the bridge, and now both weekly trains call as they emerge from the Severn Tunnel on their way to Bristol, and there's no way back by train unless you double back through the tunnel.

The present

Pretty little spot for a trip?  Sorry - it isn't. There's a scrapyard of site, a high spiked fence that makes it look more like a secure prison than a railway station, and I would not risk parking a car there. There is an unlocked pedestrian gate that lets your through to walk up the ramp and through another gate onto a platform with a shuttered old building and trains rushing by every few minutes. Across the track you see the platform that trains used to call at in the other direction, now covered in weeds and electrical poles.

Why is a train service still provided?  Because the legal procedures to close a station are complex, expensive, and subject to a lot of consultation. That makes sense because it would be so easy to stop calling there, but so difficult in the future to re-establish services - in fact the current situation is perverse because the "powers that be" have reduced the service to a near-useless level - as far as they can without all this extra expense of closure.

The future

Could the station do better with more welcoming facilities and a better service? Undoubtedly it could, but whether that would be socially and financially justified has never been (to my knowledge) seriously, officially, and publicly tested, and it would certainly need investment to bring back a viable 2 way service.

Is Pilning really "in the middle of nowhere"?  It certainly felt like it when a group of about a dozen of us walked there last Saturday to catch the train. A country lane from Pilning Village isn't signposted to the station, and there's no footpath for much of the way.  We lunched at the Plough which does survive about 100 yards from the station, quiet on a Saturday lunchtime but a clue in the large car park and adverts for entertainment in the evenings that this is an out-of-town venue where noise can be made without disturbing anyone.  Ironically, the railway does run from the station down past the village itself - a re-located station would be much more logical to serve the residents of the current villages of Pilning and Redwick which it runs into.  It's also noted that the road access to Pilning village itself is much better than to the current station, and that it's only a few hundred yards across the fields to the major Severnside employment and warehousing area, with its own Motorway junction too.

I can offer you multiple scenarios

1. Put an accessible footbridge back in at the current site, improve the service, and offer a village station for the future.

2. Our country is building new homes and they require transport - not only for cars but much more for buses and trains, and where better that around new or underutilised train stations?  Pilning is attractive - people want to live within a sensible distance of Bristol, the railway line is there as are the services going where they want to go, and it's not on a flood plain nor in an area of outstanding natural beauty.

3. Relocate Pilning Station near the bridge over the B4055. It's then at the village, within 300 metres of the employment area, and with platforms on the outer tracks accessed by slopes off the road eliminates the problem of how to access an island platform at a sensible price that we have at the current site.

4. Close the current station and have the main line railway run through the area but not serve it

5. Leave it as it is until someone comes up with a solution / decision and implements it.

Option 3 is covered in more detail at https://www.passenger.chat/mirror/leaflet.pdf - it started on 1st April 2018 with a suggestion that it was - err - distinctly tongue in cheek but yet all the elements to add up to suggest that it could make sense. Other studies have confirmed this.  However, there seems to be no consensus over future direction.

Illustrtations:

Pilning Station is certainly not welcoming ...


Pilning's current station is set in the countryside - this between the village and the station


Map showing current station (entrance - red dot) and possible alternative (cyan dot)


Bristol Rail Campaign await the train


The twice-weekly train calls. Noted that only members of the Bristol Rail Campaign party got on, and no passengers left the train.