Titfield – 70 years on
During the steam era there were scarcely a handful of movies which involved a substantial amount of British railway content. In my lifetimeI can single out only The Ladykillers, The Titfield Thunderbolt and the original (Lionel Jeffries) The Railway Children. Bearing in mind that The Railway Children was filmed ona preserved railway, that leaves only the other two as reflecting anything of the real BR of the day.
Filmed in the glorious summer of 1952 and released in cinemas in 1953, has its 70th anniversary this year. Much has changed in those seven decades, not least the almost complete erasure from the landscape of both the Camerton branch line and the Somerset& Dorset at Midford, which featured in the film. True, you can walk over Midford viaduct and imagine the ‘West Country’ in the opening sequence, but so much woodland has grown up around the viaduct that it can scarcely be seen, and the course of the branch beneath it is almost
