Last Gas Lit Stations on BR

[urbophile]

I wonder if oil-lit actually existed until later. To have gas meant you were on a, generally urban, gas supply, which normally had electricity close to hand by BR times. If the station was still gas lit it was more because they had not got round to updating it. Country stations might well have neither.

I can certainly remember stations in Somerset being oil lit in the 1960s. Yeo Mill Halt, on Taunton-Barnstaple, was the last I recall. Halts, with no staff, would require some way to turn them on and off, sometimes by a porter from an adjacent station travelling to and fro, sometimes by the guard on the last train. If there was a reliable regular passenger on the last train the guard would maybe give them the nod to do the work instead on their way out, saving them
time and the effort. Country people still had a good understanding then of what to do with oil lamps.

I remember Gargrave station in (now) North Yorkshire was lit by oil lamps. Several times the porter-in-charge would jump on the last train to go home to the next station where he lived, and ask me or my dad, who had just got off, to extinguish them for him. I had left the area by the time the station became unstaffed when I presume electric lighting was installed. Skipton, the much larger station down the line, was very sophisticated because it was gas lit. Again I don't know when it was converted.

 

[Rikki Lamb]

Ilkley 1988 when the station was partly redeveloped as a supermarket, carpet and shops. Gas would have probably continued if it hadn't been refurbished at the time

 

[lyndhurst25]

Berney Arms station still had its single oil lamp in the early 1990s.

 

[Taunton]

David L Smith, in his classic book about the Glasgow & South Western Railway, wrote about the crew overshooting on a dark winter's night one trivial station by about half a mile, no real issue as they just backed up. There was just one single candle in a window. Nobody got on or off ...