By Paul Appleton
THE protracted construction phase of the Severn Valley Railway’s new refreshment room and toilet facility on Platform 1 at Bridgnorth has almost reached its conclusion, with external work completed and work on final fitting out of the interior underway as Heritage Railway went to press.
It is hoped that the building can be commissioned before the end of the season so that catering staff can vacate the portable building in the car park, which was set up as a ‘temporary’ catering building more than 30 years ago!
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The completion of the new building, Phase 1 of the Bridgnorth Development Plan, has taken around 10 months longer to complete than originally envisaged, due in no small part to the determination to get the details right and produce an authentic GWR-style building that meets 21st century healthy and safety demands.
David Postle and Bob Marrows have given hundreds of hours to the project and in the process have sourced many original fittings or had exact replicas produced.
At one point, the delivery of roof slates was delayed, due to a shortage of the right kind of slate, but even then once delivered in March, some were rejected for not being true in colour to those used across the original GWR network.
Hundreds of blue engineering bricks also had to be cut lengthways, each one by hand, in order to preserve the interior dimensions of the building – an obvious clash between Imperial measurements used by the GWR and modern metric equivalents.
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