REALLY SideTracked - Kerry Traditional Geocache

This cache has been placed on private farmland with the landowners permission, it is most important to remember this is an active site for vehicles day and night. Enter the site to the wide opening to the left of the BT building not to its right which is the private entrance to the station building itself. Please leave all gates and barriers as you find them, on a regular basis cattle graze here. With both of these things in mind I suggest only visiting in daylight hours. Being as you need to pass through the yard it can be very muddy very often! This cache is being placed along with a further two so as to get a feel for how things would have been when an operational branch line ran here. Kerry was the southern terminus of the 3¾ mile Kerry Branch railway which was opened by the Oswestry & Newtown Railway (O&NR) on 2 March 1863. The branch connected to the O&NR main line at Abermule. John Wilkes Poundley had been building up a trade in what became the famous Kerry breed of sheep and he sought a rail link to Kerry so that he could expand his business. The branch was authorised on 17 May 1861. Passenger services began first with goods trains following on 1 July 1863. By 1930 there were only a few passenger trains in each direction on Monday-to-Saturday which led to the GWR withdrawing the service completely on 9 February 1931. Sunday school excursion trains continued to run until 1939. Goods services continued to operate on the branch which became part of British Railways [Western Region] (BR[WR]) on 1 January 1948. Goods services were withdrawn on 1 May 1956 and the track was lifted by the end of 1959. At the time of cache placement the station building was in use as a private residence, a goods office and the engine shed remain still standing.