Although the story of Railholiday officially began on the 20th June, 1998, when we welcomed our first guests into The Old Luggage Van, the true beginnings came much earlier than. Perhaps the story starts in April 1996 when Dave, on a train trip to Truro, spied a derelict carriage in a builder’s yard in Liskeard. Perhaps it starts a year earlier when a siding was discovered in the station garden, or in May 1992 when we bought the railway station in St Germans. Perhaps we could look earlier, to September 1991, when on a trip to the Scilly Isles we spied an All Enquiries sign on the station building in St Germans. Perhaps it started in January 1987, when Dave and I first started going out after meeting each other at Landrake Young Farmers, or perhaps in 1975, when my father, Tony Lister, took on the role of farm manager for Port Eliot estate when I was the tender age of four. Perhaps it was when Dave was first given his double-O-gauge railway set in the late 1960s, which was to spark a passion for railways that has lasted his whole life.
However every story needs a beginning point, so it makes sense for this one to start with purchase of the station building at St Germans, as without that Railholiday could never have come into being.
All Enquiries – St Germans Station
Although we both share a passion for train travel, neither of us could ever have imagined the direction our lives have taken.
From the early days of our relationship we both loved travelling by train and our passion for travel led to Inter-railing across Europe, a journey overland to Turkey and exploring the railway networks of France. However, it was a question of practicality that led to our purchase of St Germans station, rather than a desire to find a station-themed house.
We first started looking for a house in early 1991. At the time I was about to embark on my final year of an English and Music degree at Bath College of Higher Education. Dave was living at home with his parents in Saltash running an agricultural engineering business. He had studied Agricultural Engineering at Silsoe, so much of his time was spent making bespoke machinery, decorative gates and railings and yard-scrapers, but he could turn his hand to any kind of metalwork, so also did one-off commissions.
Dave had saved up a small deposit for a house, but as he was self-employed, his income was unreliable, which meant that securing a mortgage was not easy. We had been offered a maximum of £30,000 to buy our first house. At that time it was still possible to buy a small house or a flat in Torpoint or Plymouth for this kind of money.
We knew we wanted something a bit different; for me the priority was to have a living space big enough for my grand piano. We looked at buying a tiny barn to convert in Liskeard, which at £12,000 shouldn’t have been a huge sum to find. However, the bank rejected it as the manager at the time felt the footprint of the building was too small to be worth the investment. We were very disappointed.
In the early 1990s banks were very different. The bank manager still oversaw mortgage decisions, and each case could be looked at in an individual way. Therefore because Dave had been regularly saving a mortgage-equivalent sum for a few years, although his income was unreliable, the manager could see that he was able to prioritise regular payments. However the bank manager was pretty severe in what he felt was mortgageable, and this seemed set to work against us.
In September, just before I started my third year, we caught a train from Saltash to Penzance and happened to spot an All Enquiries sign on St Germans station building. The following week I went back to Bath and Dave contacted the estate agent and had a look around. Dave was very excited by the prospect of buying the building because it had such a large footprint compared to other places of a similar price.
At the time the station was for sale for £35,000 as a commercial property. The estate agent felt it would be unsuitable to convert into a house and there was no planning permits to do so. However, Dave saw the potential.
It wasn’t an easy viewing. The main room was being used as a storeroom by the local milkman, so was accessible, as was the former station master’s office, a small storeroom and the hall. The bay window at the end of the building had been smashed so it was possible to climb in and have a look at the former waiting room. However, most of the doors had been blocked up a long time ago and there was no through passage to the rooms in the centre of the building – we just had to guess.
The building was in a sorry state. The drainpipes were rusted, the canopy sagged, and there were gaps in the canopy boards. The floors and ceilings were rotten and crumbling. The render was cracked and chipped, the windows smashed, and walls adorned with green mould and graffiti, smiley faces, squiggles and the ubiquitous slogan I hate Maggie.
I called Dave from a telephone box close to my student accommodation in Bath to see how he had got on. Dave was full of enthusiasm, not least because of the size of the space. It was so much bigger than anything else we could have hoped for, and it had a large garden. However, although the asking price was reasonable, it was still well beyond what we had been offered as a mortgage. We also needed to allow a little bit of money for the restoration and conversion work. We contacted the vendors and offered them £27,000, which they accepted. Then the work really began.
We had a builder friend who checked the structure was sound. The bank sent a surveyor who valued the rebuilding cost at £128,000, and said the property would be considerably more valuable than the asking price once work was done.
We had a great stroke of luck when it came to the mortgage. The bank manager who had previously refused us money had just retired and a new bank manager had taken his place. He’d only just taken on his new role when we put in our application for a mortgage on the station. Normally bank managers would view any projects that might be considered a risk, but the new manager was too busy, so took the surveyor’s report as a good indication that if our restoration of the building was successful, the bank would have little problem with losing their money, should they need to repossess.
Planning problems
Securing the mortgage was just one of the hoops we had to jump through. The greatest trouble of all was getting planning permission to convert the station into a house. At the time our planning officer was not keen and was doing all he could to make sure that the planning permission was refused, despite telling us he was on our side.
The problem may have been because there was a sewage embargo on St Germans at that time, but the officer was not able to refuse planning on this count because originally the station had two toilets, so if the station was restored to its original purpose (which wouldn’t have required any permissions) there would have been more toilets than the one we had built into our plan.
So instead of refusing due to the sewage embargo, the planning officer threw everything else he possibly could at the application, including noise, vibration, setting a precedent and more. To counteract this we trawled through government documents, found other station buildings that had been converted into houses, and used building regulations in order to counter-attack all of his arguments. We added triple glazing to our application, and a floating floor to reduce vibration.
At that time Cornwall was not a unitary council, but divided into districts. We were in the district of Caradon. The planning committee was made up of members from throughout the area. We travelled the width and breadth of South East Cornwall, visiting each of the members of the planning committee individually with our documents, giving them all a copy and explaining why we felt that planning permission should be given.
I was unable to be there at the time of the meeting, but Dave was. Apparently every single councillor, bar one, spoke up in favour of our application, and the planning officer was completely overruled. We were very lucky with our local representative on the panel. She was a woman who was known for saying no to things, but she was very positive towards us. She was pleased to be able to support a local young couple who were looking to create a home in the community.
We finally got planning permission nearly eight months after placing our original offer. The vendor was very reasonable, and only requested an additional £750 for the wait. She could easily have re-listed the property with planning permission and raised a far greater sum than she was originally asking for, but was kind and honourable, for which we were very grateful!
The vendor, Rosemary Gould, had actually bought St Germans station completely by chance. In the mid-1980s, British rail property board sold many surplus stations and parcels of land that it felt it were no longer needed and St Germans station was one of many sold at this time. On the 19th September 1985, Rosemary had attended an auction intending to buy a different station. Unfortunately when she got to the auction she was too late and the station she’d hoped to buy had already been sold, so instead she bought two other stations; St Germans and another on the Barnstable line.
Her original intention was to convert both stations into holiday accommodation, but the first conversion cost a lot more than anticipated and so St Germans station was sold as a means of raising funds. Rosemary did well from the purchase because she paid £6000 for the station and an additional £2500 for the garden, so £8500 in total. So we were happy and she was happy; a win-win all round. Nothing had been done to the station since its sale, so she was pleased to know that someone would be taking care of it, and came to visit us a few years after we bought it.
Although it was sold in 1986, St Germans had closed as a station in the mid ‘60s. It had then been used as a place for making radio parts, before its final incarnation as a milk store. The milkman wasn’t terribly happy about being ousted, but had been offered the chance to buy it before us. He told us “Six thousand pounds they paid for it. I wouldn’t give them six thousand pennies!” Needless to say he was one of the many who thought we were mad!
www.Railholiday.co.uk – To be continued…
