Rail station plans at Laura Ashley base

But this former railway station, a victim of the Beeching cuts, could soon be brought back into use as part of a long-running campaign by villagers to restore services to the area.

Public consultation has now started asking locals in Carno, Mid Wales, where they would want a railway station in the village should one reopen. Options include the former Victorian station, which lies next to a level crossing and became part of the former Laura Ashley factory in the 1960s. There is also an alternative site on the other side of the village.

It comes after members of Carno Station Action Group held talks with representatives of the Welsh Assembly and railway organisations about bringing back the village's station.

Now campaigners have called on villagers to have their say on the plans to show the public's backing for the project.

The village lies on the Cambrian line running between Shrewsbury and Machynlleth, but is one of several communities that lost its station during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. The campaign to reopen a station in Carno started in 2009.

Jeremy Barnes, a member of the group, said recent talks with Welsh Assembly members including Edwina Hart, minister for the economy, had led to the go- ahead for consultation.

Mr Barnes said: "We have a railway running through Carno and we have a station building – but no station. Residents have to drive to their place of work when we have a railway on our doorstep. We want to find out whether residents would prefer the station where it used to be or on the other proposed site."

Designer’s close ties to village:

The names of Laura Ashley and Carno were inextricably linked for nearly 40 years.

The community of 650 people was once home to the designer, and where she began her clothes and furnishings business on arrival from Kent with her husband Bernard in the 1960s.

Although the designer's association with the village will never be severed – she is buried in the small churchyard – the Carno factory closed in 2005, ending 38 years of production.

The closure happened 20 years after the death of Laura Ashley, and villagers in Carno believed that, had she been alive, she would never have allowed the factory to close.

But the company insisted that to survive it had to modernise and that meant moving production to another plant in Newtown.

David Snowdon, the village postmaster, spoke for the village on the day the building was vacated.

He said: "Laura Ashley put this place on the map, and started just across the road from us. She loved the village."

Laura Ashley, who was born in Merthyr Tydfil, died in 1985, aged 60, when she fell down the stairs at her daughter's home in the Cotswolds.