In pleasant, sunny weather in Lydney on Saturday, March 9th, crowds on the St Mary’s Footbridge joined invited guests on the platform for the formal re-opening ceremony of the bridge. The Chepstow Town Band played, the High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, Charles Martell, waved the green flag and Prairie locomotive 5541 pulled the train forward into the station again, to sever the white ribbon stretched across the tracks below the bridge.

Before breaking the ribbon the High Sheriff crossed the bridge with DFR’s general manager Duncan Rowe and Forest of Dean Railway Ltd’s chairman Jason Shirley for their speeches praising the work involved, next to the commemorative plaques on St Mary’s churchyard wall.

The footbridge’s unsafe condition meant it had to be closed in 2007, along with the section of footpath which it carried connecting the St Mary’s conservation area with Lydney Lake and the town centre. At last, after being dismantled by local bridge builders Mabey with DFR’s volunteer workforce in June 2018, it was returned to site and re-assembled in January as good as new. The bridge dates from 1892, is grade 2 listed and is one of only two surviving structures standing on its original site from the days of the Severn and Wye Railway.

Information boards sited around the bridge show how it used to span four tracks in what was a very busy industrial and freight environment. DFR’s platform for St Mary’s halt stands where one of the tracks used to run and the top photograph shows the space in the foreground where the fourth track used to lie. Coal traffic predominated, along with trains calling at the tin works, so the bridge was eventually built to prevent people dodging across the tracks on foot between moving trains.

After the opening ceremony the guests re-boarded the train back to DFR’s main centre at Norchard to continue celebrating all the hard work put into the project with cake and hog-roast.