A deep dive into the song 'The Slow Train', via Chris Dale on Bluesky. The author revisits the sites of 29 of the 31 stations featured in its lines.

Mark

https://trainstobeyond.com/2021/05/28/2021-uk-no-passenger-waits/

Some of the biggest travesties were lines proposed for retention but never the less closed - Oxford to Cambridge, trains to Swanage and to Kingswear, Cheltenham Spa to Stratford-upon-Avon.  Perhaps these haunt us even more than some of the Beeching proposals that were implemented such as Minehead, Tavistock and Portishead.

Yes - relieved for the current users that lines like St Ives, Exmouth and Avonmouth were saved though proposed for closure.

Almost sixty years on, a Matlock to Chinley klaxon sometimes battles to make itself heard as it's potent enough to provoke some fairly weighty voices. Not a Beeching closure, more a product of the momentum of closing lines that had been gained by the closure programme of the mid-sixties, and also, the shadow cast by the various positive initiatives that the railways were able to launch at the time - did that shadow fall heavily on the steam-age railway to create a combination of circumstances that resulted in the loss of a major component of the railway's core infrastructure?

A friend recalls meeting a relative at Stockport Tiviotdale, at a time that the electrification of Euston to Manchester was in full swing and Tiviotdale was fielding the steam service to and from London - Tiviotdale giving the impression of something from a previous age, in poor repair, dark, soot-covered, shabby and generally at the end of its days (which indeed it was). A very big contrast to the world that was in process of arriving at Stockport's other station.

Mark