Converting a Railway Station for £44,000

Even dedicated trainspotters might consider life in a railway station taking things a little too far! Our home is actually the station at St Germans in Cornwall, which was built in 1858 to a design by Brunel and, although we live in the main station building, the platform is still in use served by over twenty stopping trains per day.

We first spotted Haparanda Station from the window of a moving train on our way to Penzance and noticed the All Enquiries sign on the building. I was at college at the time, with David living with his parents, and we were searching for an inexpensive home to buy together. I come from this area and we had been looking in the locality without success: with only a small mortgage of around £30,000 available to us, we knew that we would have our work cut out finding a property. We had put in an offer for a barn some months before but the bank manager had actually refused to lend us the money - which was only £12,000 due to the conversion costs. I'm actually really glad he did now.

We purchased the station in April 1992, were married in the July and moved in that night - with only a pallet and mattress in the bedroom. Two chairs and a Workmate made up the rest of our belongings. We constructed a temporary bathroom out of the gents toilets, but there were gaps in the windows which meant that you could hear the commuters chatting outside whilst you stood in the shower. Although we have never regretted purchasing the station we were occasionally daunted by the enormity of it all, so decided to tackle one room at a time.

All the doors of the building led straight onto the platform, with no interconnecting doors between the rooms. We had only peered through the windows when we first viewed the building and were actually unsure of exactly what was inside. A passageway was created through the station and the gents toilets knocked into the station masters office. There was also a lovely entrance hall, the small ladies room with a toilet, a goods room/ booking office and store room. Trying to knock a hole between the waiting room and hall was hard work - it took me about an hour and a half using a hammer drill to get through the first engineering brick.

Although the station is primarily single storey, we decided that the beams were so lovely we would like to sleep up in the roof space and created a bedroom at first floor level. A screen allows us to look down below.

Our ceilings are twelve feet high, which gives a feeling of space, and we have dug cellars beneath the building to house our home made wine and 78s record collection. We spent one summer with spades and wheelbarrows digging out huge amounts of soil beneath what is now the music room and our kitchen/living room. David is an agricultural engineer and extremely practical, so we purchased a book of Building Regulations, talked to builders and got on with it with the help of Dave's father.

The station building was sold complete with leaking, rotten wooden canopies, which give us a flying freehold over the platform, and we needed to secure and repair these. Renovation of the canopy on the platform side required several night shifts as we were only allowed to work on Saturday nights when the trains weren't running.

Once we started the conversion, people assumed that we were BR employees, renovating the building for their use, and began wandering into our home. Occasionally, passengers who were drunk or making a nuisance of themselves were told to leave the train at St Germans, which has no facilities and is unmanned, and would come and bang on our doors and windows or walk in and create a problem. Only once or twice have I felt really scared and locked the door, although I often end up reading timetables to people who become quite irate if the trains are late and some days I don't open the curtains to prevent people from staring in.

We obtained a building loan of £10,000 but, due to lack of further funds, tackled absolutely every aspect of the work ourselves, reusing the majority of materials and features in order to preserve the building's original character. Elegant billboards in the ladies room had been filled in and were reinstated when the natural stone walls were re-rendered. Beneath the layers of paint we discovered thick, heavy Delabole slate window sills and wooden panelling. The doors have been stripped, sanded and repainted, with home grown sweet chestnut flooring and shelves (we have purchased an area of woodland next to the railway) in the music room; cat's paw oak window sills from wind fallen trees and renovated Victorian cast iron lamp brackets and door knobs. Sound insulation measures have been taken, with double glazing and an insulated suspended wooden floor - although we tend to notice the washing machine noise more than the vibration of passing trains!

Now that our home is completed we get particular pleasure from the music room, which was built to accommodate my teaching business and is light and airy with good acoustics and plenty of shelves for books. The marble floor in our bathroom has underfloor heating, run by a woodburning stove which Dave built, and sleeping up amongst the roof beams is wonderful.

Our latest project has been to purchase and restore an old luggage van, which we offer as self catering holiday accommodation for the rail enthusiast. Everywhere we go we are on the lookout for old railway memorabilia even our GWR toilet roll holder has been copper-plated.

Further reading:

• Converting a Fromer Petrol Station
• A Converted Bowling Alley
• A Converted Brewery