Desborough and the Railway

If I'm feeling too lazy to walk into town for a coffee and a trip round the supermarket, I can catch a bus to Desborough in my road. This little town now has a Costa by the bus stop and a Co-op store in what was once the yard of its railway station.

This video is full of appealing photographs of that station, which was known as Desborough and Rothwell from 1899 until it closed in 1968.

Desborough also had narrow and standard gauge lines to the north and south that served ironstone quarries and brought their product to the main line. An article in The Industrial Railway Record describes one of the lines in its later days:

The outstanding feature of this short railway is the track. The rail is of light section and flat bottomed, with earth, mud or leaf mould ballast; a stream flows over the sleepers between the engine shed and the first bridge. In several places old sleepers have been wedged between the rail and cutting side to stop the track moving. 

The cutting sides are covered with bushes and trees which overhang the track so that branches brush continuously against the train. The curves are so sharp that even when wagons are being pushed and the inside buffers are in contact the coupling is taut. 

Even a short railway like this is not immune from vandals, who recently dislodged the capping stones on a bridge parapet and pushed them off on to the track.