I can’t leave a “well done on the Olympics” post up with the Paralympics starting, so I thought I’d post some pictures of our spiffy new railway station, because I know you want to see it.

This is the new entrance. They have been working on this for a long time and but I knew they were getting close to finishing because, after they laid the nice, new entrance patio, they ripped it up to lay underground cables and pipe. This is standard procedure in British construction.

Also, we still have our Solo Café, one of the few independent railroad cafés in existence. They were going to give them the heave-ho in favor of a chain café, but popular opinion won out and Solo remained.

These are the new gates. They put in a reduced, but still respectable, number of them. When they revamped the station in Newport—a large city with a heavy commuter flow—they reduced the bank of gates to two, one for entering and one for exiting. Madness; and I wonder how that works out during rush hour. I was glad to see some degree of sense prevailed in our case.

The shiny, new stairway going up into the old bit.

Here’s where the old bit starts.

And this is the old bit. Nothing wrong with it; it looks comforting and familiar.

This was where we had to get tickets and access the station for I don’t know how many months. I’m going to miss it; it was fun climbing up the scaffolding to the train platforms.