New Passage was for many years the location of a ferry crossing to and from South Wales, running from Chestle Pill near Pilning to Black Rock at Portskewett in Monmouthshire.

This story originated in a deposition given by Giles Gilbert of Shirenewton during the course of a 1720s legal case regarding rights to operate the ferry, and which was later printed by William Coxe in his 1801 Historical Tour of Monmouthshire.

[4] The antiquary Octavius Morgan, on investigating these stories, found that the Iter Carolinum and the diary of Richard Symonds proved that Charles had intended to use the Black Rock crossing to reach Bristol on 24 July 1645, but had been dissuaded.

[4] In 1718 the New Passage ferry service was restarted by the Lewis family of St. Pierre, Monmouthshire, allowing it to be used by mail and passenger coaches between Bristol and south Wales.

However, the sponsorship by the Dukes of Beaufort of the Aust route, with faster boats and a pier, meant that by 1830 mail coaches were diverted there, and the New Passage declined.

A subsequent scheme, surveyed and engineered by Brunel and completed by his assistant Brereton, was opened in 1863 as the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway, using the New Passage ferry to cross the Severn to Portskewett.

The engineer Thomas Telford, after surveying the crossing, described it in his report as "one of the most forbidding places at which an important ferry was ever established - a succession of violent cataracts formed in a rocky channel exposed to the rapid rush of a tide which has scarcely an equal".

Between 1863 and 1886 New Passage Pier railway station was open, primarily to serve passengers travelling to and from South Wales by the ferry.

It was then sold by the Bracey family, and the building was left empty, until ravaged by the elements and neglect, it was finally demolished in the late 1970s.