THE LAST YEARS OF BR STEAM

oodford Halse intrigued. It was 40 miles from Oxford. A fellow enthusiastic geography undergraduate, Mike Hattersley, had a car. He was a transport enthusiast, and an aficionado of buses and lorries as well as railways. Six months later, he and I conspired to do our own field trip to Woodford. In the middle of pastoral nowhere but located where a low watershed divide made it advantageous to split heavy mineral trains from the North down-gradient either to London or to industrial South Wales, the Great Central established extensive marshalling yards and a large engine shed. Employment of upwards of 250 drivers and firemen, fitters and maintenance workers saw the superimposition of turn-of-the-century railwaymen’s terraced housing upon a Northamptonshire village. A strategic railway creation at the scale of the national economy, it had no inherent relation to the local scene.