Riding the West Somerset Railway had first embedded itself in our plans the first time Jack and I walked from Dunster up to the moors at Bat’s Castle. With our heads down, tracing the remains of the Iron Age fort, we suddenly heard the whistle of a steam train in the near distance and looked across to the coast at Minehead where a plume of steam was snaking its way along the coast towards Dunster.

That was when we made a promise to ourselves that we would ride that train.

It took us until September last year to finally fulfil our promise, boarding the train at Bishops Lydeard and riding it through sigh-inducing Somerset countryside all the way to Minehead for the day, and then back again.

It was everything we hoped it would be – a gentle, nostalgic journey into the bygone days of travel.

When we got back to Bishops Lydeard there was frenetic activity as the train emptied and everyone made their way to their coaches or cars. We figured there would probably be quite a queue to get back onto the A358, so we decided to bide our time with a visit to Quantock brewery which is a mere stroll away from the Heritage railway.

Sitting outside in the late afternoon sun, sipping our cold beers, was the perfect end to a perfect day

Stations on the West Somerset Railway

We decided not to join the rush (as rushed as the mainly-pension age passengers get) to claim one of the enclosed carriages at the front of the train and made our way instead towards the rear where there was a surfeit of comfy seats. With just five minutes to go before we were scheduled to depart, most of the carriage we had chosen was still empty but incredibly, when the station guard blew his whistle, the first puffs of steam drifted past the window and we drew away from the platform, there were very few seats left vacant.

The gentle rocking, occasional engine whistle, and sunshine flooding through the windows beyond which green hills, woodland, and grazing sheep passed slowly by, combined to bring on a trance-like state. To say the journey was relaxing is an understatement. Our eyes barely left the windows as we passed through unspoilt beauty even we walkers don’t usually get to see.

There are ten stations on the West Somerset line (Bishops Lydeard, Crowcombe Heathfield, Stogumber, Williton, Doniford Halt, Watchet, Washford, Blue Anchor, Dunster & Minehead) some of them looking like the sets of 1950s movies with old advertising hordes for things like Horlicks and Sunlight Soap lining the platform. Many of the places we passed through were familiar to us and having walked the King Charles Coastal path from Watchet to Minehead we even knew the otherwise-obscure Blue Anchor. But some stations, like Stogumber and Duniford Halt were unknown and provoked curiosity.

Our Rover ticket enabled us to hop on and hop off at any number of stations along the way but the number of trains operating meant that we might have been hanging around for an hour or more in what was essentially the middle of nowhere. There was also the chance that the next train to stop there would be a diesel rather than a steam train, so we decided against station-hopping and stayed on to Minehead.

A brief history of the West Somerset Railway

It was the strong trade in goods to and from Watchet harbour that first drove the need for a railway along this unspoilt stretch of coastline. A harbour since Saxon times and an important trade centre for many centuries, Watchet’s main rivals were Minehead, Dunster, Bridgewater and other places en route to Bristol, all of whom were served by the Bristol & Exeter Railway. But with the line not taking in Watchet, its nearest rail station was Taunton, 12 miles away, which impacted adversely on the town’s ability to compete.

Local businesses took it upon themselves to improve their economic outlook and decided in 1856 to engage the services of Brunel to design a West Somerset extension to his Great Western line from Bristol, in order to serve Watchet. By 1874, the West Somerset line extended to the up-and-coming holiday resort of Minehead.

In the 1950s and 1960s, summer weekends saw huge crowds of holidaymakers heading to the beach at Minehead. At that point, trains even ran through all the way from London and the Midlands. In the late 1960s Butlins opened, and the holiday boom continued which put huge pressure on the railway with people often crammed into carriages that had stood idle all winter and were not suitable for passenger use. People began to get disillusioned and switched to the bus service instead or invested in their own car.

Unfortunately, what the railway made in profit during the summer, it more than lost during the rest of the year and when, in 1963 Beeching published his report on The Reshaping of Britain’s Railways, branch lines from Taunton to Chard, Yeovil and Barnstaple were all closed. The line to Minehead continued until 1970 when school transport switched from rail to road, spelling the end of the line which closed at the start of 1971.

It was tourism that once again rode to the rescue of the West Somerset Railway when a group of private investors proposed dumping the old, inefficient diesel stock and switching to steam. By Easter 1976, the line was open again between Minehead and Blue Anchor and by 1979, trains ran all the way to Bishops Lydeard some twenty miles away, as they still do now.

Prices and Booking

The West Somerset Railway re-opens after its winter recess on Saturday 25th March and runs until early November. After that, just the Christmas Special runs until March 2026.
If you’re planning to ride from Bishops Lydeard to Minehead or vice versa, you can book a Rover ticket online which will enable unlimited travel for the day which means you can visit any number of stations along the way.

A Rover ticket costs £32.50 per person.

If you’re travelling from any other station and simply require a straightforward single or return ticket, you cannot book online, only at the ticket office, but you can check the price of your ticket here (scroll down the page).

In reality, trains don’t run frequently enough to allow multiple stops so if you’re planning on using the Rover ticket to explore, use the website to research what’s at each station before committing to spending a chunk of your day there.

Timetables

There is a very frustrating timetable system which has blue, red, yellow, green and purple days but you have to really search to find out what each of those colours means. Unless you want to take one of the ‘specials’ (high tea, fish ‘n’ chips etc) or the Christmas Special, ignore purple and green days.

The blue, red and yellow timetables are standard travel days and the only difference between them is the times but instead of putting all the train times on a single timetable, WSR have chosen to produce three separate timetables in order to make them easier to use. If only they had thought to tell you that by inserting a key!

Not all the locomotives used are steam so it’s important when choosing your train time, to be aware of the S or D above the time; this denotes Steam or Diesel. If it shows S/D either one may arrive subject to availability. When you get your tickets you will also get a leaflet showing all the timetables which makes planning your return journey and/or your stopping-off stations very easy.