Highbridge and Burnham Railway Station

Highbridge and Burnham station serves the adjacent towns of Highbridge and Burnham-​on-​Sea in Somerset, on the line between Bristol and Taunton.
Today, it’s an unstaffed halt with a small shelter on the Taunton platform and a larger shelter on the Bristol-​bound side. It’s hard to appreciate that in former times, this was an important junction with 7 platforms and a locomotive and carriage works employing over 400 hundred people.
The first station (and the one open today) was on the Bristol and Exeter Railway, and opened on 14 June 1841, with trains running from Bristol to Bridgwater, and was extended to Exeter in 1844. Highbridge was provided with a standard Brunel-​designed station in the Italianate style, with the main offices on the Up (Bristol) platform.
The next development was the opening of the Somerset Central Railway from Highbridge to Glastonbury on 28 August 1854, extended in 1858 a few miles westwards to the little seaside resort of Burnham-​on-​Sea via one of the rare rail-​rail level crossings across the Bristol and Exeter tracks. The Somerset Central buildings were smaller, brick-​built affairs, but the station — at a 45 degree angle to the Bristol & Exeter line — was provided with five platforms!
The Somerset Central Railway amalgamated with the Dorset Central Railway in 1862, and Highbridge became the site of the company’s main engineering works, although only one locomotive was built there — the main activity being carriages and wagons manufcature and rolling stock maintenance. The Bristol and Exeter became part of the Great Western Railway (GWR) in 1876.
Thus things remained until 1930, when the railway works were closed. In 1951, the line from Highbridge to Burnham closed to regular traffic, although summer excursion trains survived until 1962 and freight in 1963. In 1966 the remainder of the Somerset and Dorset (S&D) line closed, and Highbridge reverted to being a small 2-​platform station. A few miles of the S&D line east to Bason Bridge survived for freight traffic until 1972.
The GWR buildings remained until the late 1970s when they were demolished (despite being listed) replaced with smaller bus shelter type huts — since replaced by more modern equivalents. The site of the former works is now occupied by light industy and the remains of the S&D station now lie under a new housing development, appropriatelt enough called ‘Somerset Way’ and ‘Dorset Close’.
The station has a small car-​park and cycle racks, and a ticket machine, but is otherwise fairly bleak. There is roughly an hourly service of trains in each direction on the Cardiff-​Exeter line, with peak-​time departures to London via Bristol.