Railway lines

It’s a dead giveaway, when there’s a bridge over nothing. The road rises briefly, up and over the hump, a blip in an otherwise contour-less scene. On either side, just the fields continuing their uninterrupted roll. A random rise and fall. But of course there is a reason. Once upon a time a train would have passed under that bridge, a railway line marking the landscape where the hedgerow of the field now curves. 

I often pass some remnant of the old railways: a crumbling brick arch across a country lane; a preserved station platform, complete with signal, in someone’s back garden; the numerous Station Roads in towns whose station has long since disappeared. If you look at any Ordnance Survey map the fragmented, dissolved remains are there, scattered over the pages, evident in almost every settlement, the cuttings embankments and the isolated bridges and the dual carriageways that now sit in the gentle curves of the vanished railway line. 

Today I’m not just passing, I’m riding one from end to end, the Flitch Way that once linked Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire with Braintree in Essex. A strange name, Flitch Way. It’s not the only flitch around here: there’s Flitch Green, a Flitch coffee shop, Flitch and Chips. The village sign for Great Dunmow gives some explanation: this is the ‘home of the Flitch trials’ – something to do with an old tradition whereby a couple in love would have to convince a jury made up of their fellow townsmen that they had not had a cross word for a full year, and if they could do that, they would be awarded a flitch, or side, of bacon.

It’s about 15 miles from end to end, a short section in my 60-odd mile ride today that began in the winding country lanes outside Ware and will end at the seaside in Walton-on-the-Naze. It’s wild and unpaved, impassable in poor weather with flooded sections and tyre-sucking mud, but today it’s perfect, when it’s hot and dry and the only thing on my mudguards is dust. It feels deliciously adventurous. There are narrow sections crowded with summer vegetation and long stretches of shaded woodland, the light rich and mottled on the path. I pass a field entirely full of daisies. A winding brook sidles between the trees with all the allure of a mangrove swamp. Tall grasses, green and lush, grow in a water-filled ditch. Squirrels spring across the path. The undergrowth is loud with bees and hoverflies, and a butterfly brushes my arm.

A long stretch of stone and brick emerges out of the brambles alongside the path: an old railway platform. It’s not unexpected but somehow feels incongruous, a jolting reminder that this is not just a nature trail, a green corridor for my enjoyment, but had been a working railway in living memory. It would have been around the 50s when the last passenger train used the line, and the 70s when the last freight train rolled. The track would have been lifted fairly soon after that, then it was probably another 20 years or so before it was converted into a path for cycling and walking. 

I hop up to sit on the platform, legs dangling over the trackbed, and imagine the trains that would once have paused there, and the people who would have used them. Where does this fascination with our lost infrastructure come from? If it’s a track that’s in service I have limited interest, but as soon as the words ‘dismantled railway’ appear on my map I’m hooked, wanting to trace every inch of it, especially those that are unpreserved, obsessed with the random embankments, the gullies at the back of people’s houses, the brick abutments across rivers where the bridge itself has been removed. It’s the same for the old canal network. Most of the abandoned waterways are infilled now but there are some places where the ditch still lies, now absorbed by the landscape. It’s the mystery, the history. Once an ordinary part of life, now gone.

Many miles of my cycling life have been spent riding along the remnants of the once-extensive railway network. The quality is varied: some are rutted and muddy like this, where the line rumbles between settlements in the countryside. Some are paved and elevated, like the Alban Way, where trains would have chugged past the back of people’s houses. The most notable of them all is probably the Bristol to Bath railway path, preserved for cyclists and walkers by a group of volunteers that started what we now know as Sustrans. It was the first of their many routes that eventually became the National Cycle Network, the web of routes that criss-crosses Britain along canal-side paths, country lanes, and old railway lines like this one.

Another platform, another halt, each one carefully preserved with its cast iron sign and its station house still standing. A delightful reminder of the story that these tracks once told. The jewel in the crown has to be Rayne, though, the last stop before the line reached Braintree, where every aspect of the old station is there in glorious technicolour. I spend a long time just looking: the wide stone platform; the red brick station building with bright yellow detail around the windows; the huge billboard of the Great Eastern Railway announcing the stop. Chairs and tables occupy the platform, spilling out from the Booking Hall cafe. At the end of the platform is even a short section of track and a single carriage, waiting as though for passengers. I lean my bicycle against the wall and step inside. 

‘Would you like me to show you around?’ I’m greeted at the door by an elderly gentleman volunteer. It’s quiet inside, a little chilly. A map on the curved edge of the ceiling shows the route from Bishop’s Stortford to Braintree, with all the old halts and stations and pubs. The walls are covered in black and white photos of people and locomotives. On one side of the carriage, there’s a model of the railway yard, with its tiny train going up and down the tracks between the points and signals. Then further down are the chairs and tables, preserved for us to sit in. The luggage racks are full of old carrying cases. At the end of the carriage, a series of timetables hangs from hooks.

‘Where are you riding today?’

‘To Walton-on-the-Naze. I started in Ware.’

‘Ah.’ He takes a piece of paper from its hook. ‘Once upon a time you would have been able to take the train all the way.’ 

I take the paper. It’s an itinerary for day trips to the seaside. For 15 shillings and 6 pence the good people of Hertford and Ware could go to Frinton-on-sea and Walton-on-the-Naze, setting off at 0755, spending the day on the beach, and returning by 2136. A 1950s excursion. 

I step back into the sunshine, the old timetable now safely added to my luggage. Yes, once upon a time I could have rolled along this route in a carriage like this, pulled by a steam train. But now, I ride it.

There’s a lot of vitriol for Beeching, who famously shut a third of the track network and over half the stations in the 60s. He’s become a figure of hatred for railway enthusiasts and sustainable transport advocates, because of his seemingly short-sighted measures to prioritise road building and the motor car over rail. His drastic cuts programme is now seen as brutal and damaging, and there is talk of re-opening some of the lost lines. But does he deserve it, really? Steam and diesel trains weren’t particularly green, after all. And the problems that we now have with car culture and road dominance couldn’t have been predicted then. Oh, I won't defend him too enthusiastically, but it’s easy to see why the private motor car would have been a more attractive investment when branch lines were haemorrhaging money. Something had to change, and change it did. As with anything, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

Still, it’s sad to think of those scraps on the OS map, and the many miles of track that are no longer there. Now we know what we know, now we are where we are, that lost rail infrastructure feels like a tragedy. We build bypasses on our bypasses yet still never have enough room for all those cars. What would have happened had we kept it all? A spider’s web of low-carbon transport rattling through the countryside, connecting the places we wish to go. No town left unconnected, no one forced to drive everywhere because there’s no other way. A nation of rail users, rather than drivers.

It’s something to contemplate as I approach the outskirts of Braintree, where I’ll take my leave of the trackbed and join those drivers on the tarmacked roads that will speed me towards a much-anticipated dip in the sea. Yes, it’s easy to curse Beeching and his fabled axe. But without it I would not be here, rolling over the imprints of long-removed sleepers, as cowslips snag my handlebars.