The stations so tiny you have to stick out your arm to stop a train
STeAM trailing in its wake, The Cathedrals explorer comes to a halt at dunrobin Castle station. It is a station like few others – you have to stick out your hand if you want a scheduled service to pick you up at the delightful halt in Sutherland.
The request stop is the private station of the dukes of Sutherland, where you can step off the train directly through the gates into one of the stateliest homes in Scotland.
The trainspotter third duke, who built it in 1870, even had his own personal locomotive and train. Today, however, anyone can use the station to catch the Far North Line ScotRail services heading north to Thurso or Wick and south to Inverness.
dunrobin Castle is just one of the stations celebrated in a newly published book, Tiny Stations.
It explores a lost Britain through its railway request stops. Travelling from Cornwall to Scotland, the author dixe Wills visited around 40 of the nation’s smallest and quirkiest stations where passengers are still required to signal for the driver to stop.
Some have only one service a day, and a few just a single train a week. Several have fewer than 100 passengers a year. In all, there are more than 150 stations where the train will not stop unless, standing on the platform, you put your hand out to flag it down or, if you are already aboard, tap the shoulder of the guard to give warning.
Buckenham station, deep in the Norfolk Broads, is kept open strictly for the birds — the feathered population at the bird sanctuary on its doorstep vastly outnumber the annual passenger total of just 79.
This is a world of achingly long intervals between services, where it always seems to be Sunday afternoon and the only sounds are the buzzing of insects and the hum of signal wires. In some ways it is idyllic — in the words of travel writer Paul Theroux these rail byways are characterised by ‘dusty coaches rolling through the low woods, the sun gilding the green leaves and striking the carriage windows, the breeze tickling the hot flowers …’
But be warned. You will need to arrive early to position yourself on the request stop’s platform so the driver can see you. And you may look in vain for a toilet or a taxi — and sometimes even for shelter from the rain. Still, unexpected joys await the intrepid traveller.
At Berney Arms, Britain’s smallest station, you alight at a platform just one carriage long, built in the middle of a marsh so squelchy that brushwood had to be laid beneath the tracks when the line was built.
There are no houses in sight and the nearest road is three miles away. The skimpy platform shelter has all the space of an upright coffin and has a hole in the back to stop it being blown away. But all around is an earthly paradise of boundless horizons, reedy dykes and soaring birds. And silence.
Miraculously, though, there’s a good pub a short walk away.
Arriving at a request stop halt to catch a train can be both an exhilarating and unnerving experience. Such power to be able to flag down a 70-ton Super Sprinter just for yourself! The rules say you must ‘raise your arm so the driver can see you’.
But what happens if the train fails to turn up? A moment of panic as you check whether that faded timetable flaking off the noticeboard is still current. Perhaps you have hiked for miles and yearn for a return to civilisation, a hot meal and a pint. It happened to me at a windswept halt on the Cumbrian Coast line near Sellafield as rain lashed in off the Irish Sea.
It was surreal to have to ring through to baking Bangalore to reach the National Rail Inquiries call centre — where, predictably, they hadn’t a clue. Luckily, the signalman in his crumbling Victorian wooden signal box allowed me to toast my toes on his fire over a steaming enamel mug of tea until the train arrived.
AT ReddISh South in Greater Manchester, the solitary weekly train departs at 10.20am on Fridays only for the 16minute journey to Stalybridge. This is one of Britain’s ‘parliamentary services’ — ‘ghost trains’ on lines in a railway netherworld, retaining the minimum service under law, because the authorities can’t quite get round to closing them.
Reddish has probably the most primitive facilities of any station, with just a bare asphalt platform, no seat, nor even any lighting. Yet you might find the ‘Stalybridge Flyer’, as it is known, busy, since it is a favourite with ‘gricers’ — enthusiasts who travel round the country to ‘cop’ a rare train.
For me, it was more romantic to head to Cornwall and take the little branch from Liskeard to the picturesque fishing village at Looe, stopping the train at the magically named St Keyne Wishing Well halt.
The well is a few minutes up the hill from the platform and gets its name from St Keyne, a 5th-century holy woman who imparted magical powers to the waters, whereby ‘whichever of a married couple should drink of them first, he or she would have mastery of their wedded life’.
In Victorian times, couples would leap almost suicidally from the train in a desperate race to gain household supremacy.
how grateful we must be that these stations never closed. As poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, the patron saint of threatened branch lines, wrote in one of his most famous railway poems, dilton Marsh halt: Was it worth keeping the
Halt open, We thought as we looked at
the sky Red through the spread of the
cedar-tree, With the evening train gone by? Yes, we said, for in summer the
anglers use it, Two and sometimes three Will bring their catches of rods
and poles and perches To Westbury, home for tea.
So, let’s say hurrah for all the request stops and remote platforms, with all their evocative names and eccentricities.