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By the time the lines from Bath and Bristol to the north closed, their function had been lost - they were presented as a duplicate local railway between the centres of Bath and Bristol, a relic of the steam age. This was less than accurate, as a major function was as an express route north from both cities. In this they were hampered by their past. The route from Bristol, a conversion of a horse-drawn tramway, was steep, though straighter than it might have been. The line from Bath was better, but the quality route ended in the city: onward travel subjected the passenger to antics that were the despair of later railway planners, who proposed to replace the lot with something rather more efficient.
As it was, the line to Bath closed to passengers. The proposal to plumb the railway into the main line and take it to Bath's other station surfaced for the final time, but instead the railways retreated from a slice of the travel market in two cities they could have served better. The Bristol line remained - it was always the better of two unpleasant choices for trains heading north. The city end of it was closed almost casually, some years later, when an embankment subsided, and trains north were thence confined to the trudge via Filton. The demolition trains took the last of Mangotfield's rails, and the track north as far as the M4 crossing. By then Bristol was inflicting an urban road system on itself that is still growing. In 1999 it swallowed a mile of the railway trackbed. By that time the planners were prepared to forget that it could have any other use.
Today, rail passengers heading for Bath from the midlands, via a change of trains, amidst the congestion of Bristol, can check their watches as their train slows for the makeshift junction at Westerleigh and reflect that the sixties reorganisation of Bristol's railways often adds an unreliable hour or so to what was a twenty minute journey. The failure to provide a path for the railway alongside the newly constructing Avon ring road represents a local failure of transport planning to embrace current thinking on provision of different modes of travel. Bath and the railhead at Westerleigh are separated by just eleven miles of trackbed. Not a great deal ...
The stage is now set for a poignant collision
between at least a century and a half of different transports, as another
layer is added to the paths cut by the first industrial age here.
Threading its way beneath various later accretions is the well defined
path of a horse drawn railway, a curious relic with gentle curves and a
just-less-than-lifesize appearance. This line, climbing steadily
away from the river valley, still passes beneath the occasional curious bridge or short tunnel,
their arches of a distinctive shape commonplace for just a few years
before being eclipsed by the new invention, the steam railway.
Built to take coal down to the river, the tramway was too much a miniature
to be converted to serve the age of steam - one wonders if
Brunel came across it and chose his seven foot gauge
in exasperated overcompensation - the steam age when it came
took away the horse drawn line to Bristol: for the next one hundred
and twenty years or so rail traffic north from the city
would pound up the bank where the horse drawn trains
had once run on their wrought iron rails seated on stone blocks, run the
level few miles through the tunnel at Staple Hill and swing past the
curious junction station at Mangotsfield, a broad centre platform in
the 'Y' between diverging lines, delicate cast iron window frames and
an extensive glass roof carried on iron latticework, all laid out beneath
the curious bluff of Rodway Hill, a very animated scene.
Animated, but much misunderstood by the sixties when the railway here
was broken entirely, along with the station, its ironwork cut by the
torch and its buildings half demolished and for fifteen years or so
the track degenerated to mud and well trodden ballast.
The line to Bristol has now reasserted itself as a path, very well used, that to Bath, equally popular, is to be somewhat mauled by the final section of the city's outer ring road, and with the land stripped bare of vegetation, for a few weeks now it is possible to stand in the path of all three and witness the progression in scale from horse tramway to railway and now the comparatively huge land take of the new road. While tramway and railway appear to have coexisted for some time, the railway's demise preceded the new road which is likely to suppress forever the reuse of a line which with a proposed new connection at its southern end came close to being revitalised as late as the nineteen sixties.
This clear evening in late April I walked to the lip of
Rodway Hill to find the trim remains of the station laid out beneath
like some ruined model, trees forming an unintentional garden of
remembrance for the line. A mile or so south a three arched bridge still
crossed a cutting, notching a hillside on the way to Bath, but earth
moving equipment had already trimmed the soil from its flanks, and
stripped the vegetation from much of the land towards the junction with
the direct line north, leaving the bridge at its southern end stark
and awaiting demolition alongside a new housing estate that was springing
up on the site of the factory there.
I walked down and through the ruined
station with its curious survivors, the cast iron hexagonal
lattice of the window frames with their last coats of paint but blind
without their glass, and the odd scattering of decorative floor tiles
belying the ghostly feet of one time travellers; and then on along the
curve towards Bath to the second point of the triangular junction.
Turning north was the railway bridge carrying the road from the village,
and beside it an earlier survivor, a short tunnel carrying the
tramway beneath the road. Both of these will vanish beneath the new road.
Clambering across to the shallow tramway cutting
I followed this south for a hundred yards or so beneath one of the line's
stone arched accommodation bridges, to the site of its flat crossing
of the later railway. 
Beyond this its onward course across a meadow had
been disrupted by works for the road and this had brought the tell tale
stone blocks to the surface, each one drilled with two holes. A three
yard section had been excavated archaeology fashion, revealing the crushed
stone path along its centre line for the horses.
Back to the railway
and across the cleared wastes along the 'back road' leading north, now lit
by increasingly horizontal evening sunshine to the old station building
at its north end, in the process of conversion to a house, and where a
mound of fresh waste exuded an unlikely series of railway artefacts
including a most unlikely object eight feet long with a spear point on
one end and a handle at the other. Though it was bent by persons unknown
into the shape of a vast fish hook 
I could only conclude that it was
a lost fire iron from some vanished engine or other. I walked the third
side of the triangle and was resting half way, studying the arrow headed
point of the fire iron, when with perfect timing a low whisper from the sky
announced a Concorde flight, climbing out across the Atlantic, built
just a few miles from where I stood, and already two thirds of the way
through her own lifetime.
October, and the road is taking shape. Some local people have been taken aback at the scale of the roundabout on the site of Mangotsfield's South Junction: intriguingly this encircles the precise point of the railway line's crossing of the earlier tramway - for the time being both formations can be seen crossing each other here. Looking north and south from the site of the roundabout, the railway overbridges still stand: while on the west side rise the piers of the bridge that will carry the railway path. To the north also can now be seen the crest of the tramway's 'Ghost bridge' and the tunnel - in a late change of plan the historical significance of these has been acknowledged and both are to be retained. Repairs have been done to the abutment of the 'Ghost bridge' next to the new road - earth moving machinery would utterly unmake this small structure in one blow - while the tunnel bridge is protected by temporary steel piles.
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