A 1922 campaign to reopen Medbourne railway station

From the Grantham Journal, Saturday 16 December 1922.

Medbourne

Re-Opening Railway Station Wanted. - At a meeting of the Parish Council, steps were decided upon with a view to inducing the G.N.R. Company to re-open Medbourne Station, which was closed during the war,, and the train service from Leicester to Peterborough, via Seaton Junction, suspended.

Medbourne station was open for only 33 years. It and the short line through it opened in 1883, the line was singled in 1905 and the station was closed as a wartime economy measure in 1916.

After that the line was used chiefly for storing wagons, but wasn't lifted until the 1960s.

One problem with the station was that the GNR's Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough service, which called there, took a circuitous route - though probably no more so than the Leicester to Peterborough service that runs today via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford.

The Medbourne Village site suggests that people there would rather have had a train to Market Harborough.

One irony is that the village sat inside a triangle of lines, so whichever way you left Medbourne, you crossed a railway. No wonder there was a campaign in 1922 to get their station back.