| That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by Mark A at 20:38, 1st December 2025 |     |
A deep dive into the song 'The Slow Train', via Chris Dale on Bluesky. The author revisits the sites of 29 of the 31 stations featured in its lines.
Mark
https://trainstobeyond.com/2021/05/28/2021-uk-no-passenger-waits/
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by Red Squirrel at 10:56, 2nd December 2025 | |
Gosh, a very deep dive!
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by grahame at 11:12, 2nd December 2025 | |
Gosh, a very deep dive!
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
That song has come into my head a couple of times recently while waiting at St Erth for the train to St Ives.
Beeching's report probably got it about half-right, on balance. The half he got wrong will still be haunting us 100 years from now..
Some of the biggest travesties were lines proposed for retention but never the less closed - Oxford to Cambridge, trains to Swanage and to Kingswear, Cheltenham Spa to Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps these haunt us even more than some of the Beeching proposals that were implemented such as Minehead, Tavistock and Portishead.
Yes - relieved for the current users that lines like St Ives, Exmouth and Avonmouth were saved though proposed for closure.
| Re: That Flanders and Swann song... Posted by grahame at 11:43, 2nd December 2025 | |
Under the "Creative Commons v2" license, I can share the map - origins at the post linked earlier in this thread ... and looking through the list of 31 stations mentioned, I have passed through / visited just 8 or 9 - mostly the ones still there.
