Old railway bridge abutments

Image: © John Winder Taken: 25 Apr 2014

This is all that remains of the bridge which carried the grandly - named Mitcheldean Road and Forest of Dean Junction Railway over Hoovers Lane. The railway is a footnote, at best, in the complex history of the railways of the Forest of Dean, but in a nutshell construction was begun by the MR&FoDJR to link the GWR's Grange Court to Hereford line with the line from Bullo Pill and Cinderford. However, in the time it took them to write down their rather unwieldy name, they ran out of money and had to be bailed out by the GWR, who completed the line in around 1885 but never ran trains over the whole length of it, other than private GWR traffic. The rails on the section north of Drybrook Halt were lifted in 1917. Various stories are told of this section of line, including the tale of an ordnance train turning up at Drybrook late in WW1 expecting to travel to Hereford despite the rails having been lifted by that stage, which appears to have been overlooked when the journey was planned!

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0