Published on 2nd April 2005
The 2nd April 2021 marks 16 years since the installation of the Silk Mills Road bridge to span the railway at the south end of Fairwater Yard.
Silk Mills Road in Taunton links the A38 from Wellington to the A358 to Minehead and Norton Fitzwarren. The road name originates back to the 13th Century when Taunton was a prosperous wool making town. Although named Silk Mills Road, locally it has always referred to as 'Silk Mills'.
The road was originally built during the 1970s to link the Westernmost extremities of Taunton's roads, to give a good link between two main road arteries. Unfortunately, the floor in the plan was the railway. The road needed to cross the Bristol/ London to Exeter mainline at the South end of Fairwater Yard adjacent to Silk Mills Signal Box. Rather than construct a bridge, a flat road crossing with barriers was chosen. No one at the time could have predicted the traffic congestion problems that would occur some 35 - 40 years in the future.
During the 1990s traffic in the town had grown to such an extent that a large queue of cars was causing delays with traffic backing up onto other roads in the area while the barriers were in the down position. During evening rush hour periods it would not be uncommon to take nearly 20-30 minutes to negotiate the length of the road, due to the periods traffic was sat ideal waiting for trains to pass by. The County Council had to act, and after years of surveys, talks, meetings and planning, a plan for Silk Mills Bridge was put forward to ease traffic congestion and incorporate a Park and Ride Scheme close by.
The Bridge would change the look of the area forever, it was a huge scheme, but it would also provide Taunton with a new vantage point to view train services in the area, and a way of reducing the traffic congestion in the town. Taunton Trains covered the event at the time because of its importance to the railway scene.
Silk Mills bridge became a local landmark and many have forgotten the old railway crossing ever existed. We hope this page will serve as a timely reminder of how the area has changed from its original construction in the 1970s through to the current day. It is however a tad ironic that despite the Country Council spending hundreds of thousands on this new road scheme that traffic congestion is in the area is now worse than ever. After the bridge construction and opening of the bridge planners saw fit to reduce the speed of the road down from a mixture of 40mph and 60mph to just 30mph throughout, and then installed a record number of traffic lights at various junctions over the entire length of the road. As a result travel times of 15 - 20 minutes over the length of the road at rush hour are no different to sitting in one position waiting for a train to pass!
