Looking for Welford and Kilworth Station

By Lamberhurst [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons

Between North Kilworth Wharf and the village there used to be a railway station. Welford and Kilworth stood where the Market Harborough to Rugby line crossed the main road.

When I went to look for it on Saturday I had a feeling that there had been a lot of the station left to see years after its closure in 1966. 

By chance I met an old friend this week, and he recalled photographing its remains in the late 1980s, when you could still see the concrete lampposts that appear in the picture above.

You can find the station site easily enough today as the trackbed on either side of the old level crossing is still in use as a private road.

I though I was being fanciful in hoping the building in the photograph below was left over from the station's goods yard, but in fact it is.

You can see its distinctive roof in the background of the photograph of the station above.

On my shelves I found a copy of Recollections of Country Station Life by Harry Aland, who worked at Welford and Kilworth for many years.

He writes:

Mr Double, the Station Master, was another enthusiastic gardener and his private garden was a show-piece. He used to grow large quantities of tomatoes in the open, with corrugated zinc sheets behind the plants to trap the sun. He had wonderful crops and was able to sell some to the staff, as well as to the drivers and firemen.

And inside the slim book I found a review I had clipped from the Harborough Mail in 1981, which shows traffic waiting at the station level crossing.