Railway Request Stops A Personal Odyssey To Visit Every One In Britain

a fascinating book and I must admit I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when it first landed on my desk. However, upon opening it, I quickly became engrossed.

Written by Anthony Hart, the book is a personal story of how the author visited every request stop on the UK mainland rail network.

These request stops, often rather lonely outposts bereft of the facilities that many of us expect from even an unstaffed station, are largely viewed from passing train windows.

The text is written well in an entertaining style. Each visit is detailed, including particulars such as the stop’s annual passenger usage, its ranking as a least-used station, the postcode for the stop, and also the Ordnance Survey national grid reference. The author started his study of request stops at Berney Arms in August 2017, with an annual passenger usage of 996. That led to him researching how many request stops there were in the UK at the time – 152 – and he set about visiting each one between 2018 and 2019, finishing his tour of the network back at Berney Arms, where he started the adventure just over two years earlier.

This is a great book that recounts the author’s tour of the network and is accompanied by photographs of the various request stops in what clearly became a labour of love. A quirky quest, but one that involved a lot of planning, and I admire the author’s commitment to completing it.

The hardback book contains more than 200 pages in A4 format, with colour photography throughout. For £30, it represents good value. I suspect it could very well encourage other people to begin their own quest to visit these 152 railway request stops themselves. Recommended.

AMC