Cardiff Queen Street railway station
Valley Lines trains converge here, but local train travel wasn’t so easy in the early years – when central Cardiff had three separate stations!
Cardiff’s first line was the Taff Vale Railway from Merthyr Tydfil to Cardiff docks in 1840-41. The Rhymney Railway’s direct route from Caerphilly to the docks opened in 1871. The companies had separate stations in Crockherbtown (the area renamed Queen Street in 1886).
Both stations were on the Roath side of what’s now Newport Road, until the TVR opened a “new and commodious station” south of the road in 1887. The RR station closed and the TVR one was enlarged after the companies merged into the Great Western Railway in 1923.
The aerial photo below, courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Wales, shows the rebuilt station in 1929 – see the footnotes for details. It is from the Aerofilms Collection of the National Monuments Record of Wales.
The colour photo, courtesy of John Davies, shows an evening peak train to Treherbert arriving from Cardiff General (now Central) in 1962.
In Victorian times, goods wagons were exchanged between the TVR and the GWR’s main line on a connecting track near Bute Terrace (on the main line’s north side). In 1881 Lord Aberdare said his journeys between Aberdare and London involved walking a mile between the TVR and GWR stations through “one of the filthiest parts of Cardiff” or taking a big detour via Worcester.
After Merthyr Chamber of Trade took legal action, the Railway Commissioners ordered a passenger service between the TVR and GWR stations. On the service’s first day in December 1881, Lord Aberdare and Chamber of Trade members (including solicitors and a former high constable) bought through tickets to Newport and took a morning train to Cardiff, where the GWR superintendent rejected their tickets! Solicitor Frank James was adamant the party wouldn’t buy GWR tickets.
Lord Aberdare saw the funny side and made “jocular remarks”. At Newport the gentlemen had their names taken at the ticket barrier, before lunching at the King’s Head Hotel.
British Rail rebuilt Queen Street station in the 1970s, and later closed the platforms on the east and west sides. They reopened in 2014 along with a new entrance building, in which a TVR First World War memorial is displayed.
Postcode: CF10 4EY View Location Map
Copies of the old photo and other images are available from the RCAHMW. Contact: nmr.wales@rcahmw.gov.uk
Footnotes: What the 1929 aerial photo shows
Most of the station platform area was roofed in 1929. On the right is a large signal box, near the site of the old Rhymney Railway station. The carriage sidings were originally a Taff Vale Railway goods yard, which had a goods shed parallel to the station.
The tracks leading out of the bottom of the photo were the RR route to the docks. Today’s line to Cardiff Bay is on a former TVR route to the docks.