page_title: Yatton railway station
section_title: Modern times
hierarchical_section_title: Yatton railway station / History / Modern times
caption_attribution_description: English: The southbound platform at Yatton railway station.
context_page_description: Yatton railway station, on the Bristol to Exeter line, is in the village of Yatton in North Somerset, England. It is 12 miles west of Bristol Temple Meads railway station, and 130 miles from London Paddington. Its three-letter station code is YAT. It was opened in 1841 by the Bristol and Exeter Railway, and served as a junction station for trains to Clevedon and Cheddar, but these lines closed in the 1960s. The station, which has two platforms, is managed by Great Western Railway, the seventh company to be responsible for the station, and the third franchise since privatisation in 1997. They provide all train services at the station, mainly hourly services between Bristol Parkway and Weston-super-Mare, and between Cardiff Central and Taunton.
  The line is not currently electrified, and there is local support for electrification as an extension of the Great Western Main Line upgrade programme. A community centre and café was opened at the station in 2011.
context_section_description: British Rail was split into business-led sectors in the 1980s, at which time operations at Yatton passed to Regional Railways. In the 1990s, a stop was added at Yatton for a Royal Mail train to provide a more direct link to Bristol Airport. The service was ended in 2004 when the post office stopped transporting mail by train. When the railways were privatised in 1997, local services at Yatton were franchised to Wales & West, which was in turn succeeded by Wessex Trains, an arm of National Express, in 2001. The Wessex franchise was amalgamated with the Great Western franchise into the Greater Western franchise from 2006, and responsibility passed to First Great Western, which was rebranded as Great Western Railway in 2015.
  There was somewhat of a revival of fortunes for the Cheddar Valley Line, which has been converted into a foot and cycle path. A 6-metre-high (20 ft) metal arch was erected in 2000 to mark the start of walk. The station buildings on the westbound platform have now been converted into the Strawberry Line Café, which opened in 2011, providing employment and training for people with learning disabilities, as well as snacks for commuters, walkers and local residents. The café suffered two break-ins in 2017, with significant damage caused.
  In March 2005, Wessex Trains, the company managing the station at the time, introduced car parking charges. It was noted that this resulted in less use of the car parks, more local street parking and caused people to drive to Nailsea and Backwell railway station, where parking was still free. Following local pressure, the charges were reduced in July 2005.
  The eastbound platform buildings were refurbished in 2005 to guard against rising damp. A year later, in 2006, replica Great Western Railway benches were provided by the National Trust. Hanging baskets were brought to the station in 2011 as a joint effort between the Severnside Community Rail Partnership, Cleve Nurseries and the station's garden group.
caption: The building on the westbound platform has been converted into a café.
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