A timber and coal yard was set up on our present site at Station Street by Stanley Gwilt in 1876 almost 10 years after the opening of the railway line in 1865 at the height of railway mania.
Charles Ransford took over the Station Street timber business in 1936 as it evolved into a sawmill and in the early 1970s it was in turn taken over by his son John. In 1978 it ran into financial problems and on the 4th of July that year was taken over by local brothers Alan & Brian Evans who saved the sawmill from bankruptcy at a time when it employed over 120 people, all of them local.
Had the mill gone, all of those jobs would have gone with it.
Alan & Brian’s grandfather Arthur had started A Evans & Son in 1936 as an egg and poultry business and was subsequently joined by his son Jack. By the 1970’s it had developed into a business supplying transport and plant hire to, among others, the sawmill. A Evans & Son was one of the largest creditors.
On the face of it the purchase was a bargain: Alan & Brian paid £100, but along with the purchase came £1.5 million of debts incurred by the previous owners. This was a huge sum in those days – but every penny of it was paid off over the following few years. By 1982 Alan & Brian were investing in the mill with the installation of what was then a state-of-the-art Swedish sawing line.
Many of the people who work in the mill today are long-standing employees whose parents worked there before them although the business has an active policy of encouraging new talent.
A fifth generation of the Evans family, who still own the mill, work there too and the company’s vehicles are still liveried as A Evans & Son. The business takes a special pride in its vehicles: the Foden in the picture above has been owned, from new, since 1947.
Further substantial investment has continued with over £25 million invested in recent years alone and we are now one of the most advanced and most respected sawmilling operations in the country. You can see how the mill looks now and how it looked just before the purchase in the pictures above.
This modern state of the art sawmill (which is powered in part by solar energy) now occupies most of the site of the old station and surrounding areas and both Stanley Gwilt and Charles Ransford would have to look very hard to recognise any of their buildings. However, tucked away in one corner of the site is the old Bishop’s Castle Railway Ticket Office and Weighbridge, still evoking the history of a bygone era, which Ransfords now leases for a peppercorn to local railway enthusiasts working as The Weighbridge Project.
