Tuesday, May 28, 2024 Cardiff Bay is one of Wales’ oldest railway stations and in the middle of a major city but it’s among the worst connected in the UK until now. For the past 18 years, the only direct train you could get from the one-platform halt at Cardiff Bay is Cardiff Queen Street. It is down the one-mile branch line to the country’s second busiest station.
If you wanted to go to or come from anywhere else, you’d have to change trains. It’s currently one of only a few UK stations to have a direct link to just one station – but from next weekend that will change. As well as going to Queen Street, from Sunday, some trains from Cardiff Bay will also go back and fore to seven other stations.
The additional stops form a new service that is included in the latest part of the £1bn investment into improving the rail network in Cardiff and the south Wales valleys. The station was at the southern end of a line built in 1840 that helped make Wales one of the world’s greatest powers during the Industrial Revolution. Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of railway’s most famous engineers, the Taff Vale Railway carried Wales’ greatest natural asset coal from the mines around Merthyr Tydfil to the docks in Cardiff to be exported around the world.
Cardiff Bute Docks station, as it was known initially, was first mentioned in Bradshaw’s railway timetables in 1844, a year before the station was renamed Cardiff Docks. It was renamed Cardiff Bute Road in 1924 as the .