The Moseley Railway Trust is delighted to announce that
the new railway station at Apedale Road was opened to the public on Saturday 12th
April 2014.
The Apedale Road station is on the 2’0” gauge Apedale
Valley Light Railway, which is owned and operated by volunteer members of the
Moseley Railway Trust. The station was declared open during the first public
operating day for the railway in 2014. The new station was part-funded by a
grant from the Co-Operative Community Fund. In recognition of this, the opening
was carried out by Mr Steve Ward, the manager of the Co-Op store local to the
railway in Chesterton, Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Phil Robinson, Chairman of the Moseley Railway Trust,
said “We are delighted to open this new station. This is a key step along the
path of extending our railway, and is an important milestone in the Trust’s development
of the site at Apedale. For the first time, our visitors can alight at the far
end of the railway. We’ve stopped being just a train ride and become a proper
railway to transport people! We would like to extend our gratitude to the team
at the Co-Op Community Fund for their assistance with this project”.
The new station is adjacent to Apedale Road, and allows
visitors to access the adjacent Apedale Community Country Park.
The Apedale Valley Light Railway will now be open every
Saturday, Bank Holiday and some Sundays until the end of October. There is a
regular programme of special events through the year, including a three-day
event in September marking the centenary of the start of the First World War.
Full details can be found on the Trust’s websites,here or here.
Cast your minds back, dear reader, to the heady days of March 2004. At this time, the vast majority of the Moseley Railway Trust's rolling stock fleet was in store in a disused mill near Buxworth in the High Peak. The first fruits of the relationship with the Apedale Heritage Centre was the arrival of four locomotives for display in the Heritage Centre's museum. One of these locos was MR1111. This is one of the "bent frame" Motor Rails of the type used on the WDLR light railways of the First World War. MR111 was actually delivered from the builder on 10 December 1918, and
thus was too late for “active service”.
It appears that the loco may have been used for a while at the War Department
depot in Corsham, Wiltshire, but by 1928 it had been sold to the City of York's
Naburn Sewage Works. It was put into store in 1964 and then sold in 1971 to
William Elliott & Sons of Rufforth. It subsequently joined the MRT collection in 1992 as a kit of parts. A painstaking restoration (including a new hand-made camshaft!) led to
a triumphal visit to the Ffestiniog Railway in May 1995, where it hauled “Class D” bogie wagons in a recreation of the
duties it would have performed in France nearly 77 years ago. With all our efforts on site being focused on preparing for the Tracks to the Trenches First World War event in September, it was inevitable that thoughts would move towards extracting MR1111 from the museum. In best Cold War Thriller tradition, a Prisoner Exchange had to be arranged, and thus it was that MR5038 "City of Gloucester" came to take its place in the museum. Swapping locos in the museum is not for the faint hearted, not least due to the slightly unpredictable nature of the floor. Also, the large roller shutter doors through which the locos originally entered were no longer accessible. Careful measurement concluded that the locos would fit through the fire escape double doors. Machine skates were used for most of the moving, and there were several very relieved people when the locos did indeed fit through the doorway. 
