Atmospheric photographs and atmospheric music. The blurb on YouTube explains what we are looking at:
Although the trackbed from Romney Junction towards New Romney is easily traceable, nothing remains of Lydd-on-Sea Halt today except for a gated concrete approach road from Kerton Road.
Promoted by holiday camp development in the area, the Southern Railway decided in 1937 to realign its branch line to New Romney (which had been opened in 1884) closer to the sea and to open two intermediate stations - Lydd-on-Sea and Greatstone-on-Sea.
The opening of Lydd-on-Sea on 4 July 1937 coincided with the closure of Dungeness station to passengers; it was intended that Lydd-on-Sea, ½-mile from Dungeness, would serve both locations and its running in board read "Lydd-on-Sea (for Dungeness)".
To handle the expected flow of holiday traffic, the station was equipped with a long curved island platform with a passing loop on which was perched a small wooden shed. The traffic never materialised and the station was downgraded to an unstaffed halt on 20 September 1954 when its passing loop was also lifted.
As passenger traffic dwindled and freight became insignificant, the New Romney branch fell into decline and was listed for closure in the Beeching Report. In 1966 the Minister of Transport Barbara Castle announced her intention of closing the Appledore to New Romney Branch and passenger services ceased on 6 March 1967.
Trains still run from Appledore to Dungeness to collect nuclear waster for reprocessing at Sellafield. There's more about that and the history of the line on Kent Rail, and Derek Hayward has photographs of the old Dungeness station and its site today.
Dungeness still has a station on the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, and Jon and David get off a train there in The Elusive Grasshopper, the sixth of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories:
When they got out at the station the wind was so strong that for a moment they held on to each other. It howled and roared over the flat wastes and round the lighthouse towering above them. It whipped the smoke and steam from the engine's little smoke-stack into nothing and flattened the sea poppies growing in the shingle at the side of the track, and as they stumbled up the old full-gauge railway lines towards the school it whistled and sang strange songs among the telegraph wires.
It was not very pleasant exploring the school because the wind played odd tricks in those empty rooms and corridors and the house was full of mysterious groans and whisperings and thuds. But there was nobody there and no sign that anybody had been there since they had found Wilson stunned on the floor. Jon showed David the loose floorboard with a sketch of the grasshopper and they even searched for cigarette ends or pipe ash, without success.
I assume there really was a ruined school beside the old standard-gauge branch at Dungeness when Saville knew it. And it's also the inspiration for the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, which Lord Bonkers mentions from time to time.
I found some information about the school at https://dungeness.org.uk/life-in-the-railway-carriage-on-dungeness-beach/ and also https://www.emmabattenauthor.com/blog/the-old-school-dungeness
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for those links. As the school closed in 1940, the description in The Elusive Grasshopper is probably how it was when that book was published in 1951. Some of Saville's settings are described as they were in the Thirties when he had visited them as a young man.
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