Gone are days we had branches everywhere (From Worcester News)

Gone are days we had branches everywhere

11:41am Tuesday 22nd February 2011 in Country News latest By Mike Pryce

DOTTED around Worcestershire, they were a familiar sight before Dr Richard Beeching took his axe to Britain’s rural railway network in the 1960s.

Until then village railway stations had been the heartbeat of the countryside. Farmers and growers used them to send produce to market, they saw many a tearful departure during the two world wars and also many a happy reunion as boarding school children returned home for the holidays.

Now most are gone as the lines they supported have been wiped from the map. At some locations, the buildings still remain, converted into country homes with their air of industrial architecture softened by the style of domestic life. In other places all trace has been obliterated and not even the ghosts of passengers past wait for the midnight special.

But a new book by railway historian Colin G Maggs turns back the years to the time you could catch a train from Worcester to Bromyard, calling at Leigh Court, Knightwick and Suckley, or from Great Malvern to Tewkesbury, with stops at Uptonupon- Severn and Ripple.

Peppered with old black and white images, Colin re-tells the story of The Branch Lines of Worcestershire (Amberley £16.99).

It also shows just what a mistake may have been made all those years ago. Of course it is easy with the benefit of hindsight, but you can’t help thinking that in an increasingly traffic clogged world, many of these village halts would have been a blessing today.

Still that’s all water – or trains – under the bridge but this book does allow a look back at how it was and what we are missing.

And not only in the stations themselves, because construction of the lines was a considerable feat of engineering, particularly the track that ran from Worcester to Bromyard and on to Leominster through some of the most beautiful countryside anywhere. Were it still in existence today, there’s little doubt it would rival and probably beat for sheer panorama, the famous Severn Valley Railway.

First commissioned in 1861, it wasn’t completed until 36 years later, on September 1, 1897, and in the process swallowed up three companies formed to build it. The problem was the undulating countryside on the Worcestershire- Herefordshire border. Vertiginous in places, it gave spectacular views but engineering headaches. Today if you wander off down a track at Brockamin, near Leigh, you will come to a deep gully overgrown with trees and brambles. In this British jungle rise huge brick pillars, the supports of a viaduct that carried the tracks over Haley Dingle. A mile further on a similar viaduct took it across Broad Dingle. Now both have been all but hidden by Mother Nature.

Similarly, there is no longer any trace of the track that carried trains from Bewdley to Newnham Bridge or Great Malvern to Tewkesbury. In fact the whole story of the book can be condensed into one image from the Malvern to Tewkesbury route. It was taken on February 20, 1960, just south of Ripple and shows the old rail line with a steam locomotive pulling a single passenger carriage passing over a bridge, beneath which is the building of a new road – the M5.

The arrival of the motorways played a considerable part in the demise of the railways in the 60s and 70s, but maybe we should have kept the faith a bit more.

This books shows us what we are missing.