A story from Mason Cult on the impact of withdrawing rail services back in the day by Mr Beeching. Longing for the sound of the train, but there is no track for I have to go a long way back.
Dark evenings in a moonlit village where street lights had not arrived, the smell of farms and heat from barns, as you walked on by, the sound of feet, ones that you recognise a village, a communal den of rivalry, conspiracy and gossip. So I dream in the core of that old village overgrown and derelict, on a chilly evening the time was moving close to 7pm an image of the thirty children came too me, I had been still, waiting, listening, the best I could for the persistent chuff and pulse of a tiny steam train with few carriages, coming ever closer to the village station and the scattering of cottages and farm houses bringing back the first brave who were tasting the smoke of industrial towns and the many new roles.
I was too young to know of decline but sure enough my family village died in a remote valley high enough up for snow to stay longer and steam trains to time there journeys. I woke up and looked for a sign, a derelict rail track sighted stretching and winding through a distant hillside, remains of hotchpotch dwellings, windowless and tattered linings of decorating paper flapping inside the weather raped cottages, old carbons in a naked fireplace waiting for the camping fraternity to pass by and re-engage the flue, in glow and imagination retrospective tatty artifacts to remind the transient visitors that living hearts and souls did beat, as longing as yours, existed
at two thousand feet up a hilly train track in 1959.