Eccentric couple visit all of the country's 2,563 stations
You might think a railway station is just somewhere we’re charged an exorbitant amount of money to stand and wait a ridiculous amount of time.
But our country’s rail network is a mine of fascinating history and trivia, and Geoff Marshall and his partner Vicki Pipe are determined to share it.
The pair are now more than a month in to a 14-week odyssey taking them to every one of Britain’s 2,563 stations and documenting their trip with entertaining videos on YouTube that celebrate the whimsies and eccentricities of life on the rails.
Classic weepie: Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the film Brief Encounter
‘We wanted to do something memorable,’ says Geoff, 44, a film producer, while Vicki, who works at the London Transport Museum, is partly inspired by her great great-grandfather who was a signalman at Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire (more of which later).
There are certainly plenty of intriguing stories for them to share.
The author T.E. Lawrence, for instance, left his only manuscript of The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom at Reading station (yes, it really was Reading) and had to re-write the whole thing from scratch.
Sir Winston Churchill, meanwhile, decreed that if General Charles de Gaulle outlived him, and was therefore at his funeral, the train carrying his body to Oxfordshire for burial should leave London not from Paddington but from the less convenient Waterloo — named in honour of that infamous victory over the French — just so the President of France would have to visit it. (This is indeed what happened in 1965.)
And did you know that it was on platform 2 of Dartford station, on October 17, 1961, that a young Keith Richards spotted a young Mick Jagger with two blues albums under his arm and got talking to him about music?
CARNFORTH FOR A TEAR-JERKER The station that made a whole generation of Brits weep was Carnforth, Lancs — because it was the setting for David Lean’s masterful romantic film, Brief Encounter — about two people who fall in love but decide to put duty and their marriage vows first. Carnforth was chosen because of the danger of Nazi bombing nearer the Denham studios in Bucks, where the interiors were shot.
MELTON FOR A WARM BOTTOM There was luxury at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire: the first-class waiting room had a toilet seat heated by a hot-water pipe running through it. Many 19th-century stations provided Bibles for passengers to read during the often long waits, though just in case any felt disinclined to obey the commandment about not stealing, the books were chained up.
Geoff and Vicki’s journey — using 14-day £745 All Line Rover tickets — will take them from the most northerly to the most southerly station in Britain (Thurso and Penzance respectively), and from the Scottish station of Arisaig in the west to Suffolk’s Lowestoft in the east.
Alphabetically the extremes are Abbey Wood (Kent) and Ystrad Rhondda (Wales), while the title of shortest name is shared by 11 three-letter stations. Some are well-known, like Rye and Ely, but there’s also IBM in Scotland, which originally served one of the computer company’s factories.
Britain’s stations are also wonderful examples of its engineering greatness.
The pillars in the basement of London’s St Pancras (where you now wait to board the Eurostar) are spaced exactly three beer barrels apart: the station was designed with the Bass brewery in mind, so they could store their product there after it was transported down from the Midlands.
There’s plenty of artistic creativity associated with them as well. Not just Mick and Keef: Paul Simon wrote Homeward Bound on Widnes station while playing British folk clubs in the 1960s.
The Beatles filmed the opening scene of their movie A Hard Day’s Night at Marylebone station in London on March 2, 1964.
The experience of waiting at stations has changed over the years. You’re no longer allowed to smoke, of course — except at Fishguard in Pembrokeshire, where the only place for smokers other than the platform would be near a level-crossing, which is deemed far too dangerous.
There were different hazards at Ingra Tor Halt station on Dartmoor: ‘In the interests of game preservation and for their protection against the bites of snakes etc, dogs should be kept on a lead.’ And when he wasn’t using stations to tease French generals, Winston Churchill was rather wary of them, because of the depression that plagued him all his life (his ‘Black Dog’). ‘I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through,’ he said. ‘A second’s action would end everything.’
When the current Euston station opened in London in 1968, there were no seats, in case any non-passengers — such as tramps — decided to use them. A far cry from the old station, which had a Writing Room in which you could dictate letters and have them typed up while you waited.
It was while he was waiting at Exeter station with nothing to read that Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, had the idea for cheap paperback books you could carry round in your pocket, starting a publishing revolution.
Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s Waverley is the only station in the world to be named after a novel (given that Westward Ho! halt in Devon has long closed). The hotel next door to the station, the Balmoral, keeps its clock three minutes fast to help people catch their trains.
Politicians spend plenty of time at stations travelling to and from their constituencies, though Tory MP Norman St John-Stevas took it to another level.
Accused of not spending enough time in his Chelmsford constituency — he preferred the social whirl of the capital — he rented a flat above the station to make it easier for him to slip out and onto the last train back to London without being spotted.
His fellow Tory Alec Douglas-Home was once out shooting near a railway line, and bagged a woodcock that fell straight into the Flying Scotsman passing below. The driver left it at Berwick-upon-Tweed station, whence Douglas-Home collected it later.
One of the most famous British train platforms is Harry Potter’s 9¾ — though if you visit the luggage trolley magically sticking out of a wall at London’s King’s Cross you’ll notice it’s actually between platforms 8 and 9
Back to Reading for another political connection — when a group of patients from a psychiatric hospital boarded a train there and joined Denis Thatcher in an otherwise empty carriage.
Their carer counted the patients: ‘One, two, three, four …’ He reached Thatcher. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m the Prime Min-ister’s husband.’
The carer continued: ‘Yes, of course. Six, seven, eight, nine …’
One of the most famous British train platforms is Harry Potter’s 9¾ — though if you visit the luggage trolley magically sticking out of a wall at London’s King’s Cross you’ll notice it’s actually between platforms 8 and 9.
This is because J. K. Rowling mixed up her stations when she wrote the books: she was actually thinking of Euston.
The least-used station — only 12 people a year — is the aforementioned Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire. (Even its ‘Hill’ makes no sense: it’s below sea level.)
Back in the Twenties the line passing through Capel station in Suffolk was so quiet that one passenger, a Miss Richardson, forgot her umbrella, went on holiday for two weeks and returned to find the brolly in the rack exactly where she’d left it.
About 150 of Britain’s stations are ‘request’ stops, where you have to flag down the train as you would a bus.
These are marked in the timetable with an ‘x’ – for instance ‘15x09’ instead of ‘15 09’. One of them is Duncraig in the Scottish Highlands, on the lovely line to Kyle of Lochalsh.
In fact it was scheduled to be closed as part of the infamous cuts ordered by Dr Thomas Beeching in the 1960s — but the train drivers simply ignored the order and carried on stopping there as usual (or not stopping, if no one requested it).
After 11 years of this splendid cocking a snook at the bureaucrats, the authorities quietly put it back on the timetable.