One Sketch #162) Barry Island Woodham's Scrapyard

Steel hulks
Unregarded, unloved
Waited for salvation
From the gas axe, and blow torch.
And saviours came.

My first visit to Wales in the summer of 1976 was on an excursion train from London specifically to go clambering about Woodham Brother’s scrapyard, and I returned in 1980. 

In the late 1950s British Railways decided to phase out all of its steam powered locomotives and tank engines. Woodham’s scrapyard in Barry Island, South Wales, just outside Cardiff, won one of the scrap contracts with British Railways. Eventually purchasing 297 steam engines, Dai Woodham decided to cut up the many hundreds of coal wagons he had also bought first. Throughout the 1970s and into the 80s, Woodham’s scrapyard became a tourist attraction in its own right, as other scrapyards quickly cut up their locomotives. Woodham’s had actually scrapped a number of steam engines during the 60s, but from 1970 onwards only two more were scrapped. Of a total of 297 steam engines bought by Woodham’s, 213 were rescued, with the last leaving the yard in 1990, 4 years after I moved permanently to South Wales.