Branch Line Bliss
I have just experienced branch-line bliss. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Too often branch lines, if they even exist, are forlorn relics of the railway age where you alight at a platform with no station building or a steel-and-polycarbonate bus shelter. Not at Bricket Wood!
This week I was invited to an event at Bricket Wood Station. It’s easy to reach on the branch line, I was told, and the meeting would coincide with train arrivals and departures. Simple. So I booked a London Northwestern train from Euston and changed at Watford Junction. I had eight minutes transfer time.
‘Which platform for Bricket Wood?’ I asked.
‘Platform 11.’
Could I find it? Coming up from the station underpass, I found an overgrown set of tracks with a fence along the platform edge. After speed walking up and down, searching for a section of operational track, I was about to go back down to the underpass when I spotted a path leading away from the station at right angles, and at the far end of it stood my train.
Getting the picture
Branch line reality was beginning to sink in. In railway hierarchy, this is the bottom rung. It might be a short-distance feeder route, a spur or a meandering line with passengers numbered on the fingers of one hand. Dr Beeching axed most of this in the 1960s. Just about my only experience of a branch line was going to Mill Hill East, a spur off the Northern Line on the London Underground. Leaving the lumpen blockhouse of Watford Junction Station behind, however, I was quickly transported into another reality.
We set off down a single track with woods pressing in closely on either side. It was a surprise. Such routes are now mostly cinder tracks for walking and cycling. But here we were, actually rolling along in a train. It was like turning back the pages of history. John Betjeman, who so eloquently lamented the loss of branch lines, would have been deeply reassured. Our speed was gentle, distances between stops short, the halts peaceful. And when we came to Bricket Wood, we alighted at a proper country station.
So often on rural lines, the station building, if there is one, is unmanned, boarded up and semi-derelict. Here, the lights were on, the Tea Room open, the windows clean, the paintwork fresh. The closer you looked, the more you found to impress you. The brickwork was well pointed, the windows were sashes, the doors wooden and half glazed, as they should be, the benches bespoke, the interior lights brass and in period. Design and decoration blended in one unified whole.
Attention to detail
How did they achieve this impressive result? The answer is research, craftsmanship and attention to detail. The station was built in 1903. A century later, it had become an empty shell. Left unmanned in the 1960s, it was damaged by fire in 1972 and ended up as a Travis Perkins store, the doors and windows bricked up, the interior fittings, chimneys and dividing walls long gone. A few committed people in the local community who hated seeing their station as a wreck formed the Bricket Wood Station Heritage Trust and set about restoring the building. They needed first to discover how it had looked. Nothing if not determined, they located the original architectural drawings in Canada, repatriated them and used them to remake chimneys, doors, windows and interior wooden benches to the exact specifications laid down in 1903.
Robert Yorke, one of the Trustees, found a London & North Western Railway bench in a railway museum and commissioned a local firm to make facsimiles. They cut them down in length to suit the dimensions of the station and finished them with the name Bricket Wood. The Trust made replica signs, signboards and poster cases. They even discovered and used the correct Edwardian font for the London & North Western Railway, researched from photos of Bricket Wood and other LNWR stations. The font chosen was Neue Montreal Bold. All the signs feature ¼-inch raised letters, just like the originals.
Curious survival
It’s a mystery how this small branch line survived, and in 1988 was even electrified. It runs for 6 ½ miles from Watford Junction to St Albans and has seven stops including Bricket Wood. It used to connect to other lines from St Albans, but these links never prospered and were closed. In the early 20th century, excursion trains brought day trippers to Bricket Wood for riverside walks and visits to local fairgrounds, but that traffic petered out. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the very quietness of the station made it a popular film location and the Bricket Wood Station Heritage Trust has compiled a list of ten films that were shot there, offering glimpses of how the station used to look. Thanks to the Trust, you can now watch clips from those films.
How did they pull this off? They had a dream, pursued it steadfastly and possessed the professional skills to turn it into a reality. They negotiated a peppercorn lease from Network Rail, gathered a group of investors including the London Northwestern Railway, the Department for Transport and the Railway Heritage Trust, and energetically managed the repairs, the designs and the amenities, including a working chimney for the kitchen and underfloor heating.
As the works neared completion, the Bricket Wood Station Heritage Trust found a local baker and caterer, Cheryl Clark, to run the Tea Toom. With 20 years of experience in events and hospitality, and her own business From My Kitchen, she created a warm and welcoming retreat offering delicious home-made sandwiches, sausage rolls, cakes and tea and coffee served in floral cups and saucers. It reminds me of a highly successful business in Clapham called Tea Time, owned and run by the publisher David Holmes, where afternoon tea was turned into a theatrical event.
A destination station
I was at Bricket Wood Station for the annual meeting of the Railway Heritage Trust Advisory Panel, chaired by its Executive Director Tim Hedley-Jones. After we had received reports of the Trust’s achievements and challenges during the past year, Robert Yorke, Trustee of the Bricket Wood Station Heritage Trust, described how he and his contacts in the local community worked with the railway industry to rescue the station building. Then we all went outside for the unveiling of a commemorative plaque emblazoned with the arms of the London & North Western Railway.
As I reflect on my visit, I realize that certain understated features carry an outsized significance. The muted colour scheme, the use of arches for door and window openings, the chamfered edges and decorative capitals of the columns and the curving spandrels supporting the platform canopy, the pleasing interplay of gentle stock brick and red string courses, the dentilled cornices, the daggerboard valances, the tongue-and-groove boarding applied to ceiling and dados – all these create a welcoming environment for passengers, who are after all people and appreciate a bit of care taken on their behalf. You know and feel that the architects had you in mind, that they were striving with every decorative touch to create a warm and inviting haven for humanity. Here are no strident colours, especially no garish yellow. Everything is softened. It is a calming place where anyone could happily tarry a while.
The only thing necessary for the decay of the railways is that good men do nothing. At Bricket Wood, good men have stepped up, devoted their time and applied their talents to bring a charming country station back to life and turn it into a destination.