A place where we can go, where we are not known

The optimist's corollary of the ever-increasing horror that is the airport is the visual and environmental wonderfulness that is the Railway and its stations. Indeed, trainspotting always struck me as an eminently sensible act of appreciating the industrial aesthetic, until I realised that they were just crossing off lists of numbers. Although now and then I like to embrace my inner Fred Dibnah and gaze in awe at the glories of wrought-iron work and the magnificent enveloping lattices of the train shed, unsurprisingly my preferences are for the very late, just pre-nationalisation (or post, in London's case) era - the continental sublimity of Surbiton, and the Middlesex Dudok of the Piccadilly Line. So accordingly, I curse the very name of Beeching, for the mutilation of the British Rail network only around 10 years before environmental research would make it plain that all those pointless little stations were in fact far more urgently needed than they probably were when feverish 1840s speculation got them built.



It's a fine example of just how one-sided Butskellism was that within a decade of the nationalisation of public transport it was chopped to pieces to make way for its private successor. In Hampshire there's a little fragment of the lines denoted pointless that was kept open and preserved in aspic for nostalgists, transport enthusiasts and engineering fetishists - the Watercress Line, something which I'm sure Robin Carmody has an opinion on. Circling through all manner of aimless and smugly Tory towns like Alresford and Ropley, the stations are left with all their just post-WW2 signage, some presumably more recently added adverts for Nosegay and 'Camp' Coffee, and the elegant, nationalised rolling stock with decidedly Potterian interiors criss-crosses towns where post-1979 psuedo-Victorian buildings nearly outnumber the originals. Fun as this is, the dilapidated and hidden remnants are as ever the more interesting. Those seedily exciting locations mentioned in Smiths lyrics: 'I took you behind...a disused railway line'...the former Southampton terminus, now a Casino, with its shed and scrubland hidden behind; the Angerstein industrial railway in East Greenwich, part of which still seems to exist, shunting freight from the remains of the docks...