We became owners of a holiday business by complete chance, but if we have anyone to thank or blame it is probably our friend Mike from Bristol, who used to (and still does) regularly stay with us from time to time.
The original plan was that the station would have one bedroom, and that a high bunk above the desk in the office would provide accommodation for one friend; any more than one would have to sleep on the floor. We nicknamed the room Mike’s Room.
In terms of priority, the garden was fairly low down the list. Most of it was hardstanding, and the small bit at the back which wasn’t brick paved was compacted coal dust with very little soil content. We’d planted a couple of pear trees into this that were gifted to us when we got married. These unsurprisingly failed to thrive (although one has stayed the course and now, thirty years later, produces a modest number of pears each year). The soil was rock hard.
We bought pots and grew herbs. One year Mum gave us roses which we grew along the border of the platform in the cracks between the flagstones, but unfortunately these were sprayed to death by the railway. So our early gardening was not terribly successful. Mostly the garden was used as a rubble dump and brambles grew vigorously. Slowly the contents of different rooms were added to it – digging out the music room cellar created quite a mountain of brick, stone and concrete in its own right. Dave even had a wheelbarrow track up to the top of it.
One day in a fit of enthusiasm we decided it was time to start moving the rubble and work out what to do with our fairly large patch of land. We were surprised to find what appeared to be the edge of a platform underneath it all. It made perfect sense, as between the carpark and the garden on the building side there was a dilapidated buffer stop where a siding had been. We grabbed a spade and started digging. The siding had been filled with building waste – probably the remains of the signal box on the other side that had been demolished in the 1970s.
We didn’t expect the rails still to be in place, so were surprised when we got to the bottom and found them. Because the siding had been used for cattle, the rails had been concreted in to make it easier to wash out any slurry that collected there. The effort required to remove the rails must have been greater than their scrap value.
We called on our friends the Bonds, who sent out Ken Rawlings and Dave from St Dominick with a tractor and digger. I was terribly optimistic that we might find something of interest buried among it all. I had high hopes of unearthing the totem station sign, of which there is no record. Sadly there was nothing of interest at all, save a few rusty bolts and the odd bit of GWR branded broken china. As can be seen in the before-and-after pictures below, digging out the siding certainly was transformational!
For a while we fantasised about what we might use the siding for. Perhaps a swimming pool? But it wasn’t long before we had hit on a plan to source an old railway carriage that we could use as accommodation for Mike and other friends to stay in. And we knew just the place to find one…
When I was a child there was a large Victorian railway carriage beside the station at Liskeard, in an area that is now assigned to dropping-off and picking-up. An elderly couple used to sell bric-a-brac from it, and I remembered the wonderment of going inside and seeing the mahogany cupboards and drawers and thinking of it as a rather magical place. It was still there in the mid 1990s, so we wrote to the railway and asked if we might buy it. In usual railway style we heard nothing, and a few months later it was gone. We subsequently learnt from a friend that it had been cut into two parts and taken up to north Cornwall where it was to be used as accommodation. There’s more on this carriage later, but that’s another story…
Disappointed, we resumed our search. We travelled to Marazion to look at rusting hulks of the Pullman coaches that had languished there since they had been used as camping coaches in the sixties and seventies. They had huge potential (as did the lovely granite station building, which despite its lack of use was solid and sound). Luckily Dave is a metalworker as well as a visionary, so he could see that the work involved in moving them and doing them up would be beyond our budget. We would just have to keep searching.
Serendipity happened. In the autumn of 1995 Dave took a trip to Redruth for a meeting to do with the parish council and happened to spy what looked like the roof of a railway carriage in a builder’s yard. He took a trip investigate. There sat the derelict LSWR carriage that was to change the course of our lives. The builders had been constructing an estate in Wadebridge and rather than destroy the carriage had decided it would be best to try and find it a home. While they were moving it a woman approached them. She had been born in what was to become the Old Luggage Van sixty years previously! We would have loved to have tracked her down, but in those days before social media it wasn’t so easy. As can be seen in the picture below, the Luggage Van was certainly due a little care and attention. However, despite its shabbiness, it retained much of its authenticity.
The Old Luggage Van was far from unique in having been used as a home. In the 1930s thousands of carriages were taken out of the railway system and reused for housing. An interesting article about old carriage bodies and their use as housing stock can be found here.
We had very little money to play with, so were pleased when the building firm accepted our offer of £175. Dave organised a Hiab (a small lorry with a crane on the back) and transported the Luggage Van back to his workshop. It was a hairy ride, as the lorry was too short by about four feet, so the Luggage Van was flapping a bit at the back because one of the bottom sides had rotted away for quite a bit of its length. Luckily it was sound enough to withstand the journey!
One of our first correspondences regarding the Old Luggage Van was with a very helpful historian called Gordon Weddell, who was an expert on all things LSWR and the author of LSWR Carriages Volumes One, Two and Three. As fortune would have it Gordon was working on his third volume titled Non-Passenger Carriage Stock when we contacted him. He gave us an enormous amount of help. Gordon sadly died in September 2015, but his books, which are published by Wild Swan Publications, are still readily available.
Gordon sent us a copy of the original design of the Luggage Van, along with details of the colour scheme, right down to the mixing numbers, so we could go for optimum authenticity. Our correspondence with Gordon is featured at the bottom of this blog post.
The Luggage Van sat in Dave’s workshop yard for a few months before work began in earnest. It may have waited longer still, but for two events that would work in our favour. The first was that a good friend of ours who lived in Totnes became redundant from his work converting vans into camper vans. The second was that Dave’s grandparents both went into a residential home, selling their house and gifting us a legacy of £8000. With the planets aligning with such fortuity we employed Mark to restore the Luggage Van. At this point we hadn’t given any thought at all to using the carriage as holiday accommodation, but purely as a pitstop spare room.
Most Victorian carriages that survived did so because at the end of their life on the railway the body was unbolted from the chassis and sold for accommodation. The chassis were scrapped or reused and are consequently very rare.
As it was to reside on the siding, the Old Luggage Van needed running gear. Dave poured over Gordon Weddle’s drawings of LSWR four wheeled chassis and together with the help of his assistant Steve created a very authentic looking under-frame with operational wheels, complete with look-a-like springs.
Dave then made the Luggage Van structurally sound by replacing the rotten bottom side. This required a big piece of timber sourced from the largest larch tree in our woods, which was then sawn to size at Craddicks’s sawmill on the quay.
Mark set to work on the surprisingly big job of stripping the paint back to the original wood. He did a great job. We put him up in the room under the music room, aka the pit, from where he would emerge each morning. He was brilliant fun to have around. His storytelling skills always were superb, so each evening meal we would be in stitches as he regaled us with humorous tales, including the story of a battle he had with a hornet and a pressure washer. Both parties survived but I think everything got very wet! The reason Mark was wielding a pressurised hose was because we had him remove the paint inside and out with a pressure washer with a sand-blaster attachment. It was probably quite a crude method, but did the job. As we’ve restored more carriages, so we’ve refined the way we do things. This has also had the effect that everything takes a lot longer!
Once the Luggage Van had been stripped of paint and made structurally sound, it was moved to the station. We used a Hiab lorry from Jude Haulage to firstly move the chassis, then the carriage body.
Safely moving the Old Luggage Van required Dave’s ingenuity. He used metal beams to hold the fragile carriage together so it could be safely craned. Although it worked well, Dave says he would never move a carriage in this way again as it could compromise the roof. Now we used long strops that go underneath the carriage and up to the crane hook.
Once on the station siding, the Old Luggage Van was worked on in-situ. Dave’s ACRE Engineering business was thriving and he always had more work than he could cope with, so Mark worked full time on the project, while Dave and his Dad added labour at weekends and some evenings.
From Dave:
“On Mark’s first day of was working on the interior of the Luggage Van I learnt my first important lesson about carriage conversion. I came back at lunchtime and he’d started putting up the framework for the toilet and shower room, but as soon as I looked at it I thought that looks a bit wonky. On questioning, it turned out he was using a spirit level, which was not unreasonable, but of course what I hadn’t thought to check was whether the Luggage Van was level. I hadn’t made any attempt to level it up, it was just sitting on the rails. It didn’t occur to me. So of course he was putting up everything beautifully on the vertical, but the Luggage Van wasn’t anything like vertical, or horizontal.”
“We decided the best way round it was to jack the Luggage Van up, put wedges under the wheels and get it level, so then he could use the spirit level to do his building work. It’s something I’ve been aware of on the carriages ever since, so now wherever possible I get them level, but where that isn’t possible I do things by measurement rather than using a level.”
It was great to have Mark’s skills for fitting up the carriage. He was extraordinarily skilled with wood. He even managed to veneer the fridge by cutting super thin strips of larch.
The Luggage Van still had some original perforated zinc panels, so we preserved these, and created dummy panels for the missing ones out of galvanised steel painted black which were sprayed silver with black, using a piece of the perforated zinc as a stencil.
Mark divided up the rooms; we decided to have a separate toilet and shower, plus a small bunk room at the end. Dave made a steel framed sofa bed, reusing the painted-red chipboard that had formed the temporary walls in my music room. Nothing ever goes to waste! This meant we could accommodate four friends.
At some point we had the thought that, as we had now used all our savings, perhaps we should let the carriage out for holiday accommodation. In this way we’d have somewhere to put up friends, but we could also recoup our investment. We bought a pile of magazines from the WHSmiths in Plymouth station and settled on putting an ad in Railways Illustrated.
Because we had no images of how the Luggage Van would look when finished, we got our good friend the talented artist and bookbinder Tom O Reilly to draw a picture of the Luggage Van as it might look in the siding. We used this to create a brochure; a simple two sided affair that is reproduced at the bottom of this article. Tom also made us a beautiful leather-bound visitors book and train log, that is still in occasional use today.
We are good at getting friends and family to help. Another of our close friends, Claire, who was married at the time to Tom, did a beautiful job of making us brightly coloured blinds for the Luggage Van. Because the Luggage Van faces full sun on the platform, blind replacement is a regular feature of our maintenance work, but the original blinds now live on in a patchwork cover I later made for the bed.
Dave’s Dad was an electrician, and was working for SWEB at the time, so did all our electrics. (The South West Electricity Board, more commonly known as SWEB was privatised in 1993, then bought by PPL Corporation then EDF, finally being retired as a name by EDF in 2006). He also helped with other jobs, such as sanding; nearly thirty years later he’s still sanding and scraping for us!
We had no idea what we were doing really, but figured it couldn’t be that difficult. We asked our friends Pete and Sarah for advice, as they were in the hospitality business, and looked around their self-catering cottages for inspiration. All sorts of stuff from Dave’s grandparents house was put to good use, including some green velvet curtains that we used to divide up the rooms.
To work out what to charge we ordered catalogues from Country Cottages, and followed their pricing structure for the smallest cottages on their books.
The ad in Railways Illustrated was surprisingly successful and brought in a number of bookings. We have guests who are now good friends that have been coming since the first year we started, which is quite extraordinary. Particularly so when we think back to how different everything was in the early days.
We learnt on the job. The Luggage Van’s garden was originally open onto our own, but we quickly put up a fence between, as we felt our guests were not afforded enough privacy, and nor were we. This had the extra bonus that the garden was then enclosed for pets. At only 24 feet the Old Luggage Van was rather bijou for four people, but it was surprising how everyone managed. I think expectations weren’t quite as high in those days.
Rail workings in 1998 were far more interesting than they are today. We had china clay from Burngullow and Fowey, oil tanks heading to Penzance, and the regular night-time postal working. Every day there would be class 37s thundering through, as well as one-off engineering trains. One novelty was a once a week freight movement of light fittings. Fitzgerald Lighting had a factory in Bodmin, and sent their goods along the preserved Bodmin Railway line, before joining the mainline at Bodmin Parkway.
We also had the occasional special train rumbling through; below are a couple charters, including an always-popular steam train. In the 1960s when steam was commonplace line sides were kept vegetation free due to the risk of fire. Because this risk had passed track-sides grew wilder, with the accompanying problem of leaves on the line. Another challenge was that in dry weather steam became logistically more problematic. Considerable work in clearing vegetation over the last two decades has meant the advent of more steam in the 2020s than we had in the late 1990s. The railway provides a valuable wildlife corridor, so maintaining just the right balance between optimum natural benefit without impacting on line operations must be something of a challenge!
In 2003 the Royal Mail moved their freight to the road. In 1999 the Cornwall China Clay company was purchased by a French company called Imerys and workings were reduced. China clay trains used to pass full on the up, as they were loaded at the now defunct Burngullow workings, near Par. Nowadays when they do pass they are full on the down, en-route from the north to be loaded onto boats at Fowey. The loss of freight has meant an increased passenger timetable has been possible, but we do miss the variety of workings that we had in the early days of our time at the station.
We have the kindness of friends and guests to thank for equipping the Old Luggage Van in the early days. Guests gave us lamps and other railway paraphernalia, and our signalman friend Brian managed to source a heavy coupling chain and hook from his railway contacts.
When we welcomed our first guests on the 20th June 1998 we were in the throes of finishing the house and I was two months pregnant with Walter. As Dave was still very busy with his engineering business it was my role to do the cleaning, washing and ironing. This was to prove to be rather challenging, as while I can paint a fairly pretty picture, write a poem and play a few instruments, my talents don’t really stretch to matters of a domestic nature. I was absolutely hopeless. It took me hours to iron duvets and then they never looked very good. Cleaning took forever because I would end up with a toothbrush in the corners of the room and only remember at the end to do the big brushstroke stuff like cleaning the sink or fridge and washing the windows. I was simply not cut out for it.
I was also incredibly busy. Around about the time we first let the Luggage Van I failed my LTCL exam for the first time. I was pretty well prepared when I went up to London, then after visiting the toilet got so hopelessly lost in the building that the receptionist was on the verge of sending a search party. I’m never very good at retracing my steps and it was one of these rambling buildings with corridors everywhere. By the time I got into the exam room I had defaulted to my usual nervous-wreck setting, so unsurprisingly failed.
At that time I was teaching about thirty students, and was also the South East Cornwall representative for the European Piano Teachers’ Association (EPTA). Things got even busier in the autumn when we started to do short breaks. In early December, at nearly eight months pregnant, I went to London to do my LTCL for the second time. This time Dave accompanied me. I didn’t get lost, all went well and I passed. Just as well – I was completely unprepared for what a challenge a baby would be, so was deeply grateful I resisted the temptation to delay taking the exam until the spring.
Walter was born on the 26th January 1999 in the station after a long and exhausting labour. I have no idea if his is the first birth in the building, but I suspect it probably was. After Walter was born he would never be put down, and travelled everywhere in a sling. It was impossible to clean and change beds. We put an advert in St Germans shop and Myra responded.
Myra had grown up in the village and her brother Simon worked for Dad and was a friend of ours. Her lovely mother Jenny was my Brownie leader when I was small. She was perfect for the job. Myra lived in Menheniot and at the time had three young girls, so was glad of a bit of part time work. We paid her £30 for the cleaning and laundry and added £30 to all short breaks and week bookings on our price list, so retained the same profit. We were worried with the extra cost bookings might suffer, but they didn’t. Myra was to become a reliable and much valued member of staff for many years.
Before we moved the Luggage Van into position we checked legalities. Getting planning permission for the station had been a nightmare, and we weren’t looking forward to going through the process again. It was permissible to have a caravan in the garden, or a shed, or a railway carriage on a siding, the complication came with change of use. It is not illegal to let accommodation without planning, but it is to continue to do so after being told planning is required.
We had a fortuitous visit from a cousin of Dad’s who had been a planning officer in Bristol. He advised us that our best plan was to go ahead with letting it, and apply for permission once we were instructed to do so, as we would then be more likely to be able to call on the support of the village, who were likely to be able to see it was an asset. This was to prove to be good advice. The reason most developers apply for permission in advance is that the cost of doing something then undoing it can be prohibitive. We had nothing to lose. If we couldn’t use the Luggage Van for holiday accommodation, by the time the enforcement notice came we would have recouped some of our investment, and our friends were unlikely to want to stay for more than 28 days a year, which was the maximum number of days it could be occupied without permission.
Of course it wasn’t long before the summons came. A letter arrived following a visit from the enforcement officer on the 6th October 1998, just under four months after we welcomed our first guests. Our plans were submitted on the 27th July 1999 (things happen drekly in Cornwall) and passed on the 22nd October. We put a notice in the shop and letters of support poured in from the village. Our only objection was from the parish council, who were somewhat miffed at what they considered our disregard for the proper processes.
Looking back at the early days and our complete lack of experience it seems a wonder anyone returned! But return they did and we soon built up quite a number of regulars, many of whom have become good friends. (There are too many to list, but I’m sure on reading this you will know who you are). Some sadly have passed on, but will always have a special place in our hearts. We had some great times in our bumbling way and our guests taught us well.
In the way of an appendix, below is some of the correspondence from our early days of restoring the Old Luggage Van, and our first brochure.
