Ventnor – the old railway station

For this page I shall indulge in some real nostalgia. From my early days as a train spotter, I decided Ventnor Station was quite the most dramatic I knew. It was actually sited in an old quarry. The train, a venerable old Victorian loco with antique carriages hauled us through the long tunnel under St Boniface Down and then suddenly, you were blinking in the bright daylight as you entered the platform – with white, chalk cliffs surrounding you. The cliffs even had caves dug into them which were used for storage. I found it simply magnificent.

My picture from the 1960s shows my mum on the footplate of one of these engines in Ventnor Station. She wasn’t a regular traveller with me, but she wanted to come to the island on one of my visits. It was towards the end of her all too short life and I now look back on this day as truly a memorable occasion.

So there we see the tunnel mouth and a bit of cliff.

And now to modern times. Sadly – I think virtually everybody feels it was sad – the railway through from Shanklin to Ventnor was closed in 1966. There is no station any more. Water pipes to serve Ventnor were laid through the tunnel and the old station area became a trading/industrial estate. I don’t find it a pretty sight, or indeed a pretty site.

There’s the bricked up tunnel entrance. The concrete structure on the left is actually a water reservoir.

That’s about as good as I can get for a then and now match with the 1965 picture.

Caves still exist and are available for rent.

Here is one of them.

And another.

Yet more cave entrances.

Back in the old days they were open caverns.

Where once there were platforms and the trains from Ryde brought in the holiday makers.

We had visited the museum in Ventnor and the curator described how the town collapsed when the trains stopped.

It was as much as I could take of this once glorious station site. We returned to the caravan via Wroxall and Brading.