The Great Western Company and the West Midland and Severn Valley Railway Companies promoted Bills for Leasing this Railway in the Session of 1861. The Great Western Bill also proposed for the extension of their existing Line ending at Lightmoor, from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale. The West Midland and Severn Valley (joint) bill in addition to its provisions for leasing the Wellington line to Lightmoor provided for the construction of a Railway from the Ironbridge Station on the Severn Valley Railway over the river Severn through Coalbrookdale to the Lightmoor Station of the Wellington line at Lightmoor. There were in fact three Bills before Parliament for constructing Railways from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale, two crossing the river Severn, one joining the Severn Valley Railway at Ironbridge, and the other joining the Severn Valley and the Much Wenlock and Severn Junction Railway at New Barn. The Much Wenlock & Severn Junction Railway was authorized in 1859 by 22nd. and 23rd. Vict. entitled “An Act for making a Railway from Much Wenlock, in the County of Salop to communicate with the Severn Valley Railway and the River Severn in the same County.”
These railways conferred great advantages upon the town of Ironbridge both as a means of sending and receiving goods, and also as enabling tradesmen to economise time in attending markets or fairs, and in bringing men of business into the neighbourhood.
They also bring numerous visitors in summer time, who are attracted by the scenery in the neighbourhood. It may indeed be taken as a fact, as we have said before, that there are nooks and corners just outside and along the Severn Valley now better known to strangers than to the inhabitants; and which natives themselves have never seen. With eyes to watch the till and see their way along the beaten track of business, men not unfrequently lose sight of intellectual pleasures within their reach; in their hurry to secure gain they forget items that might serve much to swell the sum of human happiness at which they aim. Like Wordsworth’s clay, cold, potter; to whom
A primrose by a river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more,—
so, insensible to the life that is within them and the glories which surround them, they feel not that flow of which Milton speaks, that—
Vernal joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair!
Coleridge too has said,
In Nature there is nothing melancholy.
And some one else, speaking lovingly of the Author of Nature, has written:
“Not content with every kind of food to nourish man,
Thou makest all Nature beauty to his eye
And music to his ear.”