Some stations are born parkways, some achieve parkway status, while yet others have parkway status thrust upon them. Such is the explanation for an arrival at Port Talbot Parkway being such a strange experience. As passengers step out of their trains they find themselves definitely somewhere. This is in stark contrast to many parkway stations which are defiantly and deliberately located in the middle of nowhere, the opposite to railway tradition where stations are (usually) built with the aim of being close to civilisation, the better to attract custom.

Port Talbot Parkway, on the other hand, is right in town. There has been a station on this site since 1850, rather pre-dating the concept of parkway stations. It wasn’t until 1984 that Port Talbot station (it has had a bewildering variety of names in its 173-year history) had parkway status grafted upon it. It joined the club of stations like Bodmin Road and later Didcot which became parkways after long service as traditional railway stations. Despite its parkway status then, Port Talbot Parkway is right where a railway station ought to be and so has a definite atmosphere of being a proper railway station. It is all the better for it, and what a station it is.

Looming above the station’s single island platform is one of the most dramatic new station buildings of the 2010s, the result of a rebuild that was completed in 2016. Taking cues from science fiction films and artwork there is something positively extraterrestrial about the building, with its spaceship-like (or perhaps space station-like) form.

Stairs and a lift lead up to the station’s new waiting room, located in the structure pictured above. Enormous picture windows let passengers watch trains arriving from the west and provide a view over the town, an unusual experience in a parkway station.

In the 1950s and 60s, British Railways became very excited about motorway service station design in North America and mainland Europe, which placed customer facilities on bridges spanning the motorway. It saw the potential for stations to feature integrated footbridges which combined the means of crossing railway tracks with other station facilities such as waiting rooms and buffets. Banbury (1958), Harlow Town (1959-60) and Broxbourne (1960) are good examples, and the idea of integrating footbridges and station facilities is one the railway has returned to from time to time, as it has at Port Talbot Parkway.

In plan, the footbridge is a truncated trident shape. The waiting room and ticket office are placed in the central tine, with a cafe in the short ‘handle’ of the trident. The cafe has similar picture windows to those in the waiting room. Plenty of natural daylight reaches inside the building from large windows and skylights.

Running across the building is the main footbridge span, and it is here that the station really leans into its spaceship aesthetic, not to mention a dose of deconstructivism. A non-orthogonal approach is the order of the day, with angled steel beams breaking up the interior into triangles and irregular quadrilaterals filled with metal panels, under long rhomboid skylights.

Although complicated in form, the interior is austere in detail. Below the metal panels, the walls are plain at dado level and the floor is unpolished (though not rough) concrete. A large enclosure which snakes its way along the footbridge’s ceiling tidies away cabling and services and incorporates overhead lighting. This is supplemented by uplighting at dado rail height.

The outer tines of the trident are where staircases and lifts connect the station to the town on the north-east side of the station, and the station car park on the south-west side. Here again large picture windows (full height on the town side, half height on the car park side) provide views over the surrounding area. The town side building is the grander of the two and makes for a decent gateway into Port Talbot. Mostly clad in dark panels with dark brick on the lift tower, colour is introduced on vertical panels in pastel shades. An oversized porch shelters the entrance door.

The entrance on the car park side is smaller and plainer. Giving the car park the less dramatic entrance oughtn’t to be noteworthy but then again this is British transport in the early 21st Century, so it is.

There is a time capsule buried at the station, with the intention that 100 years later someone will dig it up to “learn about life in 2016”. I don’t know about you, but the UK of early 2016 already seems like a different place I would like to learn a lot more about. Apparently it was possible to visit mainland Europe for more than six months at a time and without suffering onerous border checks. Can you imagine?

Demolition of a goods shed in the early 1980s gave the opportunity to provide Port Talbot’s station with a larger car park and allow it to be repurposed as a parkway. With 143 car parking spaces (and that’s after recent expansion) compared with 453 at Tiverton Parkway and 506 at Worcestershire Parkway (both new-builds), and 682 at Didcot Parkway‘s terrifyingly huge multi-storey car park, it is not all that large by parkway standards. It does outstrip the 70 space car park at Bodmin Parkway, but it’s fair to say that Port Talbot Parkway’s urban location and consequent restrictions on space means parkway status has been slightly awkwardly bestowed upon it.

Until the mid 2010s, Port Talbot Parkway had a relatively basic brick station building and a very basic footbridge.

That all changed when the station was selected for rebuilding through the Wales Station Improvement Scheme. Plans for the station’s remodelling were unveiled in 2014 with the new footbridge and associated facilities opening in 2016 (a picture of the old and new station buildings side by side can be found here).

Although not part of the 2016 station improvement project, the station’s place in the local sustainable transport network has been improved with the provision of a new bus station immediately adjacent to its town-side entrance. The bus station, with six stands, opened in 2017. You love to see it.

Today, Port Talbot Parkway is incredibly well lit, spacious, and well equipped. With logical movement through the station it is very easy to use. The views out to the surrounding area root the station squarely in its locale. Whether its aesthetics appeal is for each individual user to decide; personally I rather liked the sci-fi feel, imagining myself as an astronaut off to work in low earth orbit for the day.

The explanation for the rebuilt station’s distinctive design is that it is a showcase for the industry for which Port Talbot is most famous. Port Talbot is a steel town, its economy inextricably interlinked with the massive Tata-owned steelworks just to the south which provide such a dramatic view from passing trains. The new footbridge at the station weighs in at some 400 tonnes with much of it (early estimates suggested 180 tonnes) accounted for by steel supplied from the nearby steelworks. At least, possibly so. Press information has tended to use phrases like, “Steel for the project will be provided by Tata Steel which has a steelworks in the Port Talbot area,” which slightly obscures its actual origin. Nevertheless, as the photos above show, that steel is shown off in a very dramatic manner.

“The building reflects the industrial strength of the town through its use of steel from TATA and provides a warm welcome to all travellers. It’s a fantastic gateway to Port Talbot and the Afan Valley,” said Aberavon Assembly Member David Rees at the opening ceremony for the rebuilt station.

This is true, but really only tells part of the story. While the station’s use of Tata steel in dramatic fashion speaks both to the predominant local industry and the skills of those who produce it, the station says more about Port Talbot’s steelworks than might perhaps have been intended.

Like most heavy industry facilities in the UK in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, Port Talbot steelworks has been on something of a rollercoaster (as summarised by Wales Online in 2020), not assisted by various recent governments’ industrial strategies in that they’ve never managed to produce a useful one. Owner Tata periodically makes some concerning noises about the future of the plant, and at the moment a particular concern is the steelworks’ contribution to UK greenhouse gas emissions. Every tonne of steel produced in its blast furnaces pushes two tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the evidence is all around us that the atmosphere can’t keep taking all the carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) we keep pumping into it.

Tata wants to replace Port Talbot’s blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces. While blast furnaces use vast quantities of coke to liberate pure iron from iron ore, electric arc furnaces use giant electrodes to melt down scrap metal with much smaller amounts of fossil fuels used in the process – and the possibility that in future the gas burners currently used could be converted to run on green hydrogen.

Tata is looking for financial support from the UK government for this plan, the latter of which would benefit from a substantial and quick cut in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions in a single project. But the government doesn’t seem to have a plan for the future of steel production in the UK and reducing its greenhouse gas impact. In fact, despite its commitment to reaching Net Zero by 2050, the government doesn’t seem to have any particular strategy at all for actually getting there as a country. And even in those areas where there is some kind of plan, or an obvious solution, the government seems completely unwilling to put in places policies that will achieve it, fearful for its electoral prospects in an upcoming general election that no-one but the government seems to think it has any chance of winning anyway.

Which bring us back to Port Talbot Parkway. There is one jarring element of the station experience which detracts from this otherwise hyper-modern station. As soon as passengers reach the platform they find that the station’s platform structures did not get replaced as part of the station upgrade that saw the building of the new footbridge and street-level buildings.

Although the older platform building has been clad to match the lift tower on the town side of the station, the yellowed canopy and scruffy end wall give the impression of a station refubishment that has run out of steam halfway through. Yet inexplicably this was always the plan, as can be seen in pre-construction visualisations of the project.

Just like Port Talbot steelworks, Port Talbot Parkway is awkwardly stuck between an optimistic vision of the future, and the legacy of a history it is struggling to escape; one which is out of step with current expectations.

Meanwhile, the trains that serve the station have their own story to tell. Although the modern GWR Intercity Express Trains look the part, they growl in and out of the station under diesel power. They shouldn’t need to. The original plan for the Great Western Main Line Modernisation project, which upgraded infrastructure alongside the introduction of those Intercity Express Trains, envisaged electrification of the railway through Port Talbot and all the way to Swansea. It was cut back as costs rose elsewhere on the project, and now seems to have been binned permanently. The electric wires end instead at Cardiff, with trains from London to Swansea switching from clean and efficient electric power to dirty and unreliable diesel power.

The government now seems to have no policy at all on railway electrification – one of the easiest and most efficient ways of decarbonising the railway – beyond cancelling as much of it as possible and progressing only the projects it has proved impossible to dump. Just as with steelworks, the future of the railway is electrification if decarbonisation targets are to be met. The technology exists. The only thing that doesn’t is direction from the government. At a time when significant parts of Europe are melting and/or on actual fire, that seems unforgiveable.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Chatterton, Mark (2021): Parkway Railway Stations: A History of Britain’s Park and Ride stations. Gresley Books: Horncastle

More on Port Talbot Parkway’s rebuild

…and anything linked to in the article above.