What's Notable About Port Talbot 2) Public Transport

 

Here’s one way of getting a first inkling about the view a town or city has of itself – take a good look at the places where you arrive in the place, and where you depart from.

So let’s start with the bus station. The first time I ever came to Port Talbot, in the summer of 1985, to meet my girlfriend’s (later to be my wife) parents, and then to head off with her to the Gower for a week’s camping, I got off the National Express Bus in the bus station here.

As with much of Port Talbot since the War, the building gives us the choice of either looking at the glass half full or half empty. Taking the latter, well, there’s not a lot of ‘there’ there. If you look on the picture which was sketched in 2017, you can see that there’s a series of metal canopy roofs, which stretch between concrete columns and a large brick faced concrete wall. The windows and doors within each bay have all been placed there since I arrived in town, during the 1990s, and were a very welcome addition. I learned to drive in 1991, but prior to that I would take the bus to Briton Ferry to work, and believe me, on a winter’s day this was a very bleak and inhospitable place. Even now it’s not that much to look at, but at least it always did the job well, compared to a lot of municipal bus stations of my own experience. In fact the only thing which really didn’t work about it was that it’s a five minute walk or so to the train station. This is because it was built tacked onto the shopping centre, during the remodelling of the town centre in the 1970s.

Now, taking that point about the distance from the train station, a few years ago a new bus station was built literally just outside the train station. Ah – thought we of the town – that makes sense. Now you can get off your train, with full shopping bags, or suitcases, or whatever, and get straight on a bus to take you to wherever you live in the town. Jolly good show.- Well, the reality is that that’s not what the new bus station turned out to be for.

As I understand – and if I have this wrong, then I apologise – the new bus station was built with European redevelopment fund money, with the idea being to create a new transport hub. So, basically, the new station is not meant for local buses, but for buses going to Cardiff, Swansea and further afield.

As I said, apologies if I have this wrong. However, as I understand it there’s a basic fallacy here. It seems to me that it has been built on what was once a roundabout between the railway station and the police station, in order that people can come out of the station, and then get on a bus to another town. WHY? If you’re in, let’s say Swansea, why the hell would you get off the train at Port Talbot to get on a bus to Cardiff, when you might just as well take the train? Or vice versa from Cardiff. I admit I may well be missing something here, but I just don’t get it.

This is just based on my own casual observation, but I never see more than 1 bus in there, and that’s rare, and I very rarely see anyone waiting.

Well, moving on, while the new bus station was being built, the railway station was being rebuilt. I never sketched the previous station building– mainly because it was an unprepossessing job, with brick facing probably on a concrete structure, and a bleak and windy enclosed footbridge to the platforms. In 2012 the whole thing was rebuilt into this:-

I made the sketch in 2017 when the station had been opened, but the new bus station was still being built. I’m afraid that I strongly dislike this building. It’s not so much the shape of it – although it is too blocky for my liking. Still, in a clearly monochrome sketch it doesn’t look too bad. It looks far more dramatic than what was there before, for example. However, when you look at it in real life colour though. . . We are a town who often get spoken off as a grey industrial town. So why the hell did anyone in their right mind say – okay – first building many people are going to see when they arrive in town? Well its obvious, isn’t it, grey metal panels and grey bricks all round!- Yes, okay, there are coloured panels on the side and around the top of the rectangular tower, but even then the colours are very washed out pastel. It’s not even as if it’s a case of bad outside, but good inside. No. Inside the new station, until you get onto the platforms, it’s pretty foul. Grey, bare walls. I know that this marks me down as the kind of person who automatically says about any new building – I didn’t like what was there before, but I HATE what’s replaced it. What I really hate about this building, though, is the fact that it seems as if we have learned so little since the dark days of the 1970s.

I mean compare the station with the signal box, which I sketched a couple of years ago:-

This signal box was originally built in 1962, which was before steam was phased out on British Railways. Now, I should think it’s had quite a bit of work done on it since it was first built, and when I sketched this in 2017 it had, as you can see, a lot of scaffolding around it. But being honest, can we actually say it’s that much worse than the current station? I don’t think so. It has brown brick facing for one thing. The windows at least break up the surfaces of the blank walls, and the uncovered staircases are more appealing, and probably a lot better to use than the covered ones of the station footbridge. Well, by all means dismiss my opinion as that of an uninformed grumpy old git, but personally I think that we, as a town, should be aiming a little higher than being about as appealing as a 1960s signal box.

Once upon a time, there were a lot more railways running through Port Talbot. Using a photograph, I made this sketch of the Aberavon Seaside Station, which was closed before I was born in about 1959.

Now, the reason why I include this is that in the background, to the right of the gasometer, you can see a bridge. This carried Victoria Road over the railway, and was called Beach Hill, and very much a local landmark. When the tracks were taken up, the trackbed was converted into a roadway called the Afan Way. It made sense to demolish Beach Hill, and make a crossroads intersection between the Afan Way and Victoria Road, but there was a lot of opposition to it in the town, and it didn’t happen until decades after the Afan Way was first opened.

I made this sketch in 2017, of where Beach Hill used to be, looking towards Beach Hill from Victoria Road.

I know that people are still nostalgic about Beach Hill, and I get it, I totally understand it. But I think this footbridge is a lovely looking thing. It means that you can walk or cycle from one side of the Afan Way across to Victoria Road, without risking life and limb. But more than that, the blue arch gives at an elegance. I’ve no doubt that it makes the bridge stronger, but they could have built a perfectly strong footbridge without it, and we’d be the poorer if they had.

You can head out of the town, but still remain in the Borough of Neath and Port Talbot, and see a couple of places where the area’s former railway infrastructure has been used with some imagination. A former railway line makes a wonderful track through Afan Argoed Country Park for walking or cycling. This is the former Cynonville Station, rather overgrown now, but still a nice picnic spot.

If you walk under the bridge on the left of the background, then you eventually get to Pontrhydyfen, with its lovely aqueduct and viaduct. Or rather you used to. When I made this sketch the path was blocked off close to Pontrhydyfen and I had to climb up to the roadway. If you walk the other way from Cynonville, it’s a bit of a step, but you eventually come to Cymmer, and this place:-

This is the former Cymmer station, now a café restaurant, called the Refreshment Rooms, but commonly known as The Refresh. I’m not saying that it is the most sunning station ever built, but it’s nice, and it demonstrates something which I like very much – the ability to look carefully at what we have, and change its purpose to make it relevant, so it can keep serving the town, and the town can keep enjoying it.