Medbourne station was lost 50 years before the Beeching closures

David Southwell once gave my name to the chairman of the Blaxwich Chamber of Commerce who tired to assassinate Dr Beeching in 1965, but the first railway closures took place 50 years before that.

Here is P. Howard Anderson writing of the Great Northern lines in High Leicestershire in his Forgotten Railways of the East Midlands:

The GNR based its passenger operations on Leicester Belgrave Road station where for some years there were daily departures for Grantham, Newark and Peterborough. 

The last of these three services was short lived however. It had commenced on 2 July 1883 with four trains in each direction, but the 50-mile route via Tilton, Medbourne, Seaton and Wansford somehow managed to avoid all settlements other than small villages and in 1916 the two surviving Peterborough trains were withdrawn as a wartime economy measure. 

This brought about the closure of Medbourne station, which later burnt down.

You cross the railway on the way to Bonkers Hall Nevill Holt, though the station was a little way to the north where the Uppingham road crosses it.

Today pigs forage on the trackbed, but perhaps they remember that the line remained open for goods until 1964 or have seen the vintage photographs on the Medbourne Village site.