Coundon Road Station

London North Western Railway:

Midland Railway:

Stratford Midland Junction Railway

The Shakespeare Route

Coundon Road Station

Counden Road Station (the spelling was not changed to Coundon Road until 1894) saw its first passenger train on the 2nd 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). Coundon Road was the first station out of Coventry on the line to Nuneaton. The line was opened on 2nd September 1850 and was to become a very busy secondary route primarily for coal trains avoiding the Trent Valley line. 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. 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. When the station closed it was evident that the station had two distinct architectural styles. This was because the fire mentioned above destroyed the original building requiring a replacement to be erected nearly fifty years after the original was built. 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 1960s shunting was being carried out around 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.