The Beeching cuts hit all parts of the country. Both rural and urban lines were decimated and by the end of the decade a quarter of the original trackway mileage and a half of all stations had been cleaved from the system. Here in the West Country, as in the rest of the UK, many of the most romantic small stations and desultory branch lines vanished almost overnight. They remain only as ghostly markings on OS maps: look for faint dotted lines annotated with 'track of old railway'.
One of the more weird things I came across in my searches was the post-Beeching fate of the station at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire. It was stolen! Following the closures, British Rail issued contracts for the demolition of the buildings, the clearance of the sites, and the sale of the recovered material. When the appointed contractor turned up at Cleckheaton Station he found the entire station - every stone, wooden fence, metal frame, and tin signpost - had already been dismantled and removed. Eventually the person who had dismantled the station was arrested and taken to trial (the only case in British legal history concerning the theft of a railway station). He was eventually acquitted as the court accepted his defence that he had been following the orders of what he thought was the legally appointed contractor. The company that masterminded the plan was never identified, and the station was never recovered.
And finally: whilst we are talking about slow trains, how about this live version of 'Slow Train' by Joe Bonamassa? Listen and compare and contrast with the more sedate music of Flanders and Swann. I enjoy them both, but they are very, very different.
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