There’s a railway line at the bottom of my garden.
Fortunately for me, my garden is reasonably long so, although the railway and I are neighbours, we’ve never really fallen out over anything.
It goes about its business and I go about mine and we get along, for the most part, very well indeed and thankyou for asking.
The nethermost regions of my garden. With attendant train (ECL)
It’s just as well. Because, as I don’t drive (I have Epilepsy) I am a constant and near daily user of the railway system across the UK. So I’ve become, out of sheer neccessity, a bit of a fan, a supporter, if you will, of the countries rail network.
And its little nuances and quirks are, I assure you, completely and utterly fascinating.
Did you know, for example, that the most northerly railway station in the country is at Thurso? Or that the most southerly is in Penzance?
You can’t get from Thurso to Penzance without changing at Aberdeen but, once you’ve arrived at Aberdeen station, you can do the whole journey in one go, all 785 miles of it.
It’ll take you nearly fourteen hours to do so mind you.
Here’s another fact for you. The least used railway station in the UK is Berney Arms near Great Yarmouth. Which isn’t surprising as it is several miles away from the nearest road and is only accessible by foot or boat and, according to official statistics, saw only twenty people use it for the whole of 2020.
Berney Arms station. No Costa. Yet. (Oliver Dixon/geograph)
The railway line I’d most like to have taken a trip on has, sadly, gone forever.
It was the one that snaked its way along the Norfolk coast to Hunstanton from King’s Lynn, opening in 1862 and, in doing so, playing a major part in the development of Hunstanton as a popular holiday resort.
It must have been a trip of no little delight for those who were lucky enough to use it.
One of the stations on the line was ‘the royal station’ at Wolferton, labelled thus because of its proximity to Sandringham and used, therefore, by the Royal Family whenever they fancied a Norfolk getaway for a few days.
I bet there wasn’t a neater or more spick and span station in the whole of the country.
Platform One at the long closed Wolferton station (Shutterstock)
Like so many branch lines however, the increase in road use for both freight and private journeys by the 1950’s and 60’s meant it was never going to remain as a viable option and, in 1969, five years after the last freight service used the line, the romance of travelling from King’s Lynn to Hunstanton by train was lost forever.
Most people attribute its culling to the Beeching cuts but it had survived his reign of terror only to fall at the hands of a more anonymous bureaucrat several years after Dr Beeching's famous report on the viability of the British railway network in 1964.
There is, fortunately, plenty of photographic and film evidence available today that is nobly able to show what a rather wonderful little railway line this particular branch was, no more so than the one commissioned and made by British Transport in 1962 which features, as narrator and guide, the one and only Sir John Betjeman, a champion, if ever there was one, of the nations railways.
When we first watched it, we noticed, with some astonishment, that one of the people who appeared in the final film was my own mother, captured arriving at Hunstanton station and giving her ticket to the inspector at the platform exit with, immediately behind her and to her right, the looming figure of the magnificent Mr Betjeman.
My mother hands her ticket in at Hunstanton station, oblivious to the fact that Sir John Betjeman is right behind her.
For me, a Norfolk man to his very core, that image of my Mum, at Hunstanton station, still unmarried and in her early twenties, is a very special one. At least she got to ride the railway line that will forever be an impossible dream for me.
But then she’s never had trains at the bottom of her garden!