Was authorized in 1853, but a portion only of this Railway (from
Wellington to Lightmoor) was constructed and the powers of the Act
lapsed. It was worked by the Great Western Company in connexion with
their line from Lightmoor to Shifnal and Wolverhampton.
The Great Western Company and the West Midland and Severn Valley Railway
Companies promoted Bills for Leasing this Railway in the Session of 1861.
The Great Western Bill also proposed for the extension of their existing
Line ending at Lightmoor, from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale. The West
Midland and Severn Valley (joint) bill in addition to its provisions for
leasing the Wellington line to Lightmoor provided for the construction of
a Railway from the Ironbridge Station on the Severn Valley Railway over
the river Severn through Coalbrookdale to the Lightmoor Station of the
Wellington line at Lightmoor. There were in fact three Bills before
Parliament for constructing Railways from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale, two
crossing the river Severn, one joining the Severn Valley Railway at
Ironbridge, and the other joining the Severn Valley and the Much Wenlock
and Severn Junction Railway at New Barn. The Much Wenlock & Severn
Junction Railway was authorized in 1859 by 22nd. and 23rd. Vict. entitled
“An Act for making a Railway from Much Wenlock, in the County of Salop to
communicate with the Severn Valley Railway and the River Severn in the
same County.”
* * * * *
These railways conferred great advantages upon the town of Ironbridge
both as a means of sending and receiving goods, and also as enabling
tradesmen to economise time in attending markets or fairs, and in
bringing men of business into the neighbourhood.
They also bring numerous visitors in summer time, who are attracted by
the scenery in the neighbourhood. It may indeed be taken as a fact, as
we have said before, that there are nooks and corners just outside and
along the Severn Valley now better known to strangers than to the
inhabitants; and which natives themselves have never seen. With eyes to
watch the till and see their way along the beaten track of business, men
not unfrequently lose sight of intellectual pleasures within their reach;
in their hurry to secure gain they forget items that might serve much to
swell the sum of human happiness at which they aim. Like Wordsworth’s
clay, cold, potter; to whom
A primrose by a river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more,—
so, insensible to the life that is within them and the glories which
surround them, they feel not that flow of which Milton speaks, that—
Vernal joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair!
Coleridge too has said,
In Nature there is nothing melancholy.
And some one else, speaking lovingly of the Author of Nature, has
written:
“Not content with every kind of food to nourish man,
Thou makest all Nature beauty to his eye
And music to his ear.”