| That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by Mark A at 20:38, 1st December 2025 |     |
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/
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by Red Squirrel at 10:56, 2nd December 2025 | |
Gosh, a very deep dive!
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by grahame at 11:12, 2nd December 2025 | |
Gosh, a very deep dive!
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
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.
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by grahame at 11:43, 2nd December 2025 | |
Under the "Creative Commons v2" license, I can share the map - origins at the post linked earlier in this thread ... and looking through the list of 31 stations mentioned, I have passed through / visited just 8 or 9 - mostly the ones still there.
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by Mark A at 15:01, 2nd December 2025 | |
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
