Coundon Road Station
Coundon Road was the first station on the Coventry to
Nuneaton route. The line was opened on 2nd September 1850 and was a very busy
secondary route primarily for coal trains. The Midland Railway possessed
running powers for goods traffic into Coventry over the route from Leicester
and at least one train per day in each direction passed through the station. In
1891 there were plans to build a short branch line from the end of the
platforms at Coundon Road to the gas works in Abbotts Lane. The plans were
quite well advanced but were subsequently cancelled when the decision was made
by Coventry City Council to build a new gas works at Foleshill.
Coundon Road station became the temporary terminus on the
route when the nearby Spon End Viaduct collapsed one night in January 1857. The
fault was found to be the quality of the stone used to construct the viaduct
although poor workmanship was also a factor. Passengers from Nuneaton had to
alight at Coundon and proceed to Coventry by horse drawn bus. Reg Kimber writes
"The second most momentous occasion for the station is described below:
At 2. 00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in December 1896, the
signalman at Coundon Road station noticed smoke and flames emitting from the
waiting room on the down platform of the station. A locomotive was shunting in
the nearby goods yard and was hastily driven alongside the burning building to
enable the crew to endeavour to quell the fire with water from the engine. They
were unfortunately unsuccessful and the building being burnt to the ground.
However there was cause for rejoicing amongst the passengers who used the
station as they had been campaigning for improved accommodation and now the
LNWR were compelled to do something about it.
The interesting point about this story is that an engine was
shunting in the yard at two o'clock on a Sunday morning. This gives some
indication of the amount of traffic handled by the Coventry - Nuneaton line in
these days. In fact, so heavy was coal traffic on the line that the railway
company was at one stage seriously considering quadrupling the tracks on parts
of the line.
Counden Road (the spelling was not changed to Coundon Road
until 1894) saw its first passenger train on the 2 September 1850. A prominent
local citizen, William Andrews, recorded in his diary that so popular was the
service that one train had thirty passengers riding on top of the carriages as
there was not enough room inside. It should be remembered that until the very
late 1850s most carriages had rails on their roofs to hold luggage which was
another practice carried over from the days of stage coaches.
The last scheduled passenger train to use the station called
on 18th January 1965, although on the 19th August of the same year a special
train chartered by Radford Social Club called at the station. For many years a
workman's train ran to and from Coundon Road, the carriages being stabled in
the goods yard opposite the signal box during the day. Possibly the most famous
person to use the station was the Duchess of Kent in 1958 when she visited the
Belgrade Theatre.
The station master's house still stands today and this must
be one of the oldest surviving railway buildings in the area. It is built from
stone quarried at nearby Rosehill, home of the Bray family for many years. The
level crossing gates were replaced in the early 1980s with automatic barriers.
The wharf is now but a shadow of its former self and it is hard to believe that
until the "sixties" shunting was carried out round the clock with the help of
floodlights in later years in order to cope with the heavy coal traffic. The
wharf, which contained 11 sidings, had a capacity for about 330 wagons".
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