The Last Train From Wenvoe
ARTICLES of GENERAL INTEREST
THE LAST TRAIN FROM WENVOE
I left my house in Wenvoe with my golden retriever, Blue, to walk towards the old train station. It was around 8.30pm on a warm autumn day. As I got to the bridge overlooking the old station, the sky began to turn dark, and a fog started to creep in from the hills which led to Dinas Powys.
I was feeling very good; I had reached sixty today and my daughters had brought me presents earlier on in the day. Blue had done his business near the bridge, and I got a bag out and placed the contents in the bin on the bridge. The fog seemed to roll past us both then cleared while it was travelling towards Wenvoe.
As I looked down towards the station, I could see people on the platform. It was then I heard the whistle and a green steam train pulled up at the station. I could hear the sound of somebody shouting “Last train to Cardiff. This is the last train leaving Wenvoe for Cardiff.”
I heard two cars pull up behind me. The first one looked like an old-fashioned Jag and the second one looked like an Austin 11. The Jag was a green colour and the Austin was white. A man got out of the Jag and started to walk towards me. He had a white gabardine mac on. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a packet of cigarettes, took one out and put it into his mouth. With his other hand, he hit a zippo lighter and lit his cigarette. Crushing the cigarette packet, he threw it into the bin near me.
I could see the cigarette packed was a packet of Woodbines with a green stripe going down and a red stripe going across. The man said to me “It’s the last train to Cardiff tonight. I’m going to have to get the bus back in the morning”. The Austin car opened and a young girl of twenty something got out. She appeared to be wearing a nurse’s uniform from an old Carry On movie. The man said to me “That’s Ms Thomas or should I say Nurse Thomas.” The man turned away and followed the young nurse down to the Station Terrace to get onto the platform. Five minutes later I saw the man and nurse heading along the platform to get on the train. The man looked up and waved to me.
I heard the platform conductor blow his whistle and the train started to move off. A billow of smoke came from the train and covered the area; you could smell the acrid stench from fuel being burned. I could hear a whistle as the train must have approached the Wenvoe Tunnel. When the smoke cleared, everything had turned to normal.
I walked back towards the village and decided to go for a pint in the Wenvoe Arms. One of the lads in the pub worked for the railways and said, “Happy Birthday, Frank.” I was going to tell him what happened but thought better of it. Tommy who bought me a pint looked at his phone and said, “Looking at the internet it says the last train from Wenvoe was today, the 10th of September 1962 and it’s your birthday – how strange.”