According to Chris…

His grandchildren call him ‘Granddad Trains’ and he’s been a dedicated railway modeller since the 1960s but, despite popular legend, Chris Leigh doesn’t remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth!

Chris recalls the ‘Old Worse & Worse’.

Anborough! Anborough! This ’ere’s Anborough!” I can recall that afternoon with remarkable clarity, despite it being well over 50 years ago. My brother and I had decided to take a ride down the ‘Old Worse & Worse’ – the Oxford to Worcester main line. We were bound for Chipping Campden station, which had been the subject of a series of articles in Model Railway News. The articles included scale drawings of all the station’s wooden buildings, and detailed features on how they had been modelled in 4mm:1ft scale. We just had to go and look at the real thing! We were, unwittingly, being tempted into scratchbuilding railway structures by some excellent magazine articles. On the 1.25pm Saturdays-only Oxford-evesham, the first stop was at Handborough, and it was here that the stationmaster’s rich accent rang out across the deserted platform. No one got on or off the train. A quick look out of the carriage window revealed the main building on the Up platform, remarkably similar to Chipping Campden, but shorn of its canopy and still wearing GWR light and dark stone paintwork, shabby and peeling and presumably last painted at least 15 years beforehand. It was in stark contrast to Chipping Campden which, though it too had lost its canopy, retained a splendid original stone chimney stack and sported fresh chocolate and cream paintwork everywhere. These buildings were classic examples of Brunel’s designs, adapted by local engineers to suit readily available local materials. Thus, you’ll find them in pink Somerset stone at, for example, Stogumber and Crowcombe on the Minehead branch, while those on the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway were translated into timber by John Fowler. Those on the Minehead branch survive but, sadly, none on the OW&W ‘Cotswold’ line escaped the post-beeching bulldozers. Even Handborough succumbed, despite a brief, final and sombre moment in the spotlight. As the nearest station to Bladon, the final resting place of Sir Winston Churchill, Handborough was the destination of his funeral train, headed from Waterloo by ‘Battle of Britain’ 4-6-2 No. 34051 Winston Churchill. Such was the importance of this occasion that a temporary Down-to-up line facing crossover was installed alongside Handborough’s goods shed so that the funeral train could reach the Up platform, which had road access, without shunting. By then Beeching’s axe was poised over Handborough, and instead of repainting the doomed station it was simply concealed by purple and white drapes. Good fortune and geography were on Handborough station’s side, however, and just as the line followed the Evenlode Valley, so the roads which served its stations crossed the valley from side to side. This made the provision of any logical replacement bus service nigh on impossible, so the stations at Handborough, Combe Halt, Finstock Halt, Ascott-underwychwood and Shipton for Burford were reprieved from closure. All, however, had their buildings razed to the ground and replaced by ‘bus shelters’, while those north of Kingham were closed and demolished, leaving only the larger stations which had been rebuilt by the GWR at Kingham, Moreton-in-marsh, and Evesham, plus the fine and original Brunel station at Charlbury. One other curiosity which afflicted a couple of stations north of Oxford was the spelling of their names. Handborough was traditionally spelt with a ‘d’ by the railway, but the ‘d’ has more recently been dropped to reflect the village of Long Hanborough, which it serves. A few miles north, on the Banbury line, Bletchington station served the village of Bletchingdon, but this quirk of railway spelling disappeared when the station closed in 1964.