Britain's most beautiful lost railway lines

Telegraph

23-02-2025

It is a rare political decision that is greeted with universal support. But it is surely fair to argue that few of the 'big calls' in Britain's recent history have been quite as derided – both at the time and in retrospect – as the restructuring of the railways in the mid-1960s.
The name of Richard Beeching echoes loudly here. Appointed by the Macmillan government in spite of a CV that made no mention of the rail industry, he was the engineer and civil servant who was charged with examining the labyrinth of lines that had mushroomed across the country during the Victorian train boom, and pruning the routes that he deemed unnecessary as well as unprofitable. This he did, producing a pair of reports – the first in March 1963; the second in February 1965 – that took a machete to the thicket. The first identified 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles of line for closure – figures that amounted to 67,700 jobs, 55 per cent of stations, and 30 per cent of the network. The second sealed the deal with its proposed diverting of investment to what was left. The effects were immediate, and seismic. The term 'Beeching axe' has been used ever since.
In his defence, there was an element of method to what was perceived as Beeching's madness: some of the 19th-century routes pared back by his knife had certainly outlived their viability. And in later life, he was sanguine about both his 'achievements' and the opprobrium they had brought him, musing that, 'I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping.' Nevertheless, his reforms caused outrage, left rural communities isolated – and still provoke mutterings of discontent, six decades later.
Beeching's ghost can also be a spark for nostalgia – for a romantic vision of a vanished Britain; of steam trains roaring through tunnels, their hoots and toots audible long before they slowed into picturesque village stations. Maybe this is rose-tinted thinking, forgetting the delays and the dirt – perhaps even imagining a stained-glass version of the country which never really existed. However, on the 60th anniversary of the second report, this article picks out 10 railway lines lost to the snip of those bureaucratic scissors, and traces their remains across the vistas that once thrummed with their noise and smoke.
Skip ahead:
1. Great Central Main Line
2. Moray Coast Railway
3. King's Lynn to Wisbech Line
4. York-Beverley Line
5. Carmarthen to Aberystwyth Line
6. North Devon and Cornwall Junction Light Railway
7. Wealden Line
8. Waverley Line
9. Durham-Bishop Auckland Line
10. Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway
1. Great Central Main Line
Open March 1899 to May 1969
In a letter to this newspaper on September 28 1965, railway supporter Denis Butler, the ninth Earl of Lanesborough, raged that 'among the main lines in the process of closure, surely the prize for idiotic policy must go to the destruction of [the Great Central Main Line]'. The GCML was indeed a crucial rail corridor; an engineering feat of 200 miles, linking London Marylebone to Sheffield (and on to Manchester) via Rugby, Leicester and Nottingham. Written off by Beeching for the crime of 'duplication', it was also the last of its kind. Britain would not build another main line until High Speed 1 (HS1) opened in 2003.
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Inevitably, a line of such length left marks that its closure couldn't erase. The clocktower of the disassembled Nottingham Victoria station lingers in the city's Victoria shopping centre. The platforms of the demolished Rugby Central can be seen on the ' Grand Central Walk ', a five-mile trail through the town. Other parts of the line have come back to life. The Great Central Railway preserves both the name and the route of the GCML between Loughborough and Leicester, steam locomotives chugging along eight miles of track. It has a similarly titled 10-mile sibling in Nottinghamshire. And a short strip of the route in Buckinghamshire is being redeployed for High Speed 2 (HS2).
2. Moray Coast Railway
Open April 1884 to May 1968
There is always something special about a train line that shadows the seafront. The Moray Coast Railway was a classic of the genre, tracing the north-easterly edge of the Scottish landmass and the Moray Firth over 25 miles – between the waterfront settlement of Portsoy and the historic town of Elgin (with its ruined cathedral). This was no small achievement. The route needed to avoid the local aristocratic pile Cullen House, after the Countess of Seafield refused permission for the track to cross her land. The unintended consequence was a thing of beauty; the Cullen Viaduct, an eight-arch marvel, completed in 1886, which carried the line on a detour around the estate, and over the Burn of Cullen.
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Some of the line's former route has been absorbed into the Moray Coast Trail, which runs between Cullen and Forres, some 45 miles to the west. This includes the Cullen Viaduct, which hikers can cross at the trail's eastern end. Other infrastructure is also accessible – not least the equally dramatic Spey Viaduct, which once carried the track over the last gasps of the river Spey. The former Spey Bay station, now a private home, is visible from the path.
3. King's Lynn to Wisbech Line
Open February 1848 to September 1968
Some of the routes sacrificed to Beeching's reforms were significant arteries. It is surely fair to say that this soft arc of slow-motion train travel – part of a mesh of rails which once spider-webbed across the Norfolk countryside – was not. Just short of 10 miles long in the branch-line section, which forked west off the main King's Lynn-Ely track at Magdalen Road (modern-day Watlington station), here was a service which fell into muddy-booted step with the farmers and field-workers who used it, its carriages ferrying grain, fruits and vegetables up to the coast and its wharves. Never exactly overcrowded, the railway's disappearance from the fens occurred with as little fanfare as its arrival, the landscape so flat and unaltered that you might struggle to believe trains ever traversed it.
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The line has become even less visible of late – the remains of a bridge that once carried it through Magdalen were taken down as recently as 2021. But as local blogger Lewis Collard has documented, another bridge still crosses the relief channel of the river Great Ouse on the eastern edge of the village – and can be sought out as part of a weekend walk between the two parallel strands of Norfolk's most important waterway.
4. York-Beverley Line
Open October 1847 to November 1965
In many ways, this 22-mile route across the East Riding was emblematic of the situation that led to Britain having a convoluted rail network in apparent need of simplification. Its advent fell so neatly within the construction frenzy that was the 'Railway Bubble' of the 1840s that its first section, York-Market Weighton, was completed in the year the boom collapsed, via the 'Panic of 1847' (the second section, Market Weighton-Beverley, did not open until 1865). It was also built in spite of the challenging terrain it was asked to cross, the hills of the Yorkshire Wolds. Of course, it was gorgeous as a result, making its way south-east through leafy countryside over an elaborate series of viaducts and bridges.
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Echoes abound. Several stations still exist – in Pocklington (recycled as a school sports hall); in the villages of Kiplingcotes and Cherry Burton, where the buildings are now private homes but the trackbed is framed by defunct platforms. The original York-Market Weighton section – including the glorious 15-arch Grade II-listed Stamford Bridge Viaduct over the river Derwent, which survived a demolition proposal in 1992 following vociferous protests – is now part of the National Cycle Network's Route 66. The Market Weighton-Beverley part of the line, meanwhile, is now the 'Hudson Way' – a 10-mile walking and biking trail (see nationaltrail.co.uk).
5. Carmarthen to Aberystwyth Line
Open March 1860 to February 1965
Wales was never fazed by the idea of laying rails up hillsides, and some of its tracks proved immune to removal. Opened in 1865, Gwynedd quarry route the Tallylyn Railway had become the world's first heritage line by as early as 1951 – a decade before Beeching's appointment. However, Carmarthen-Aberystwyth did fall to the cuts, even though it provided a crucial 49-mile link that all but connected the Bristol Channel to Cardigan Bay. It was, to an extent, a victim of circumstance – shoved towards the gallows by a flooding of the river Ystwyth in 1964 that drowned the line at Llanilar, and put the top 16 miles out of action, making closure an easy option. The decision was never popular. As of 2014, the Welsh government has been assessing the cost of reconstruction.
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Significant stretches of the 1860 route are still intact. Five southerly miles of track – between Abergwili Junction and Danycoed – remain in operation; used by the steam locomotives of the Gwili Railway. And much of the northern half of the line is now part of the Ystwyth Trail (details at discoverceredigion.wales), a 21-mile cycling and hiking route which follows the path of the railway as far as Tregaron.
6. North Devon and Cornwall Junction Light Railway
Open July 1925 to March 1965
Unlike some of Britain's more storied lost lines, this route along the west edge of Devon had a brief history of passenger service. It evolved out of a narrow-gauge tramway built to link the area's clay pits to the much busier railways on either side of it, and was never a major conduit – trundling at no more than 25mph, on a 20-mile arc between Torrington and Halwill. The reason for this restrained speed was a (single) track which had to contort its body around a series of sharp bends and even sharper gradients. By the time the curtain fell in 1965, trains made only two return trips per day along the full line.
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While never ideal for rail transportation, all those curves and climbs were testament to the sweeping beauty of an area which sits sandwiched between two great British national parks, Dartmoor and Exmoor. Sixty years on, some of the route (the Torrington-Meeth Halt portion) forms part of the Tarka Trail, the hiking-cycling path which cuts a figure-of-eight shape across the Devon landscape for 180 miles. The platforms (and, in some cases, the signage) for several of the old stations – Meeth Halt, Dunsbear Halt, Watergate Halt, Yarde Halt – are still in situ along the way.
7. Wealden Line
Open October 1858 to May 1969/July 1985
Unlike Leeds and Newcastle, which lost many of their surrounding lines to the cull, the rail network of London and the south-east managed – comparatively – to avoid serious damage. There were casualties, of course, and the Wealden Line was one of them. In its 1930s heyday, this 25-mile route between Tunbridge Wells and Lewes was popular with tourists heading for the East Sussex coast – taking its name from the hills of the Weald through which it passed. But falling passenger numbers and crumbling infrastructure meant that, by the time of the Beeching reports, a decision was needed: a cash injection to help fix, for example, the rickety Lewes Viaduct, or closure. In the end, there was a fudge. The lower third of the line, up to Uckfield, became past tense in 1969. The upper third, Eridge-Tunbridge Wells, clung on until 1985. Only the middle third – the 11 miles from Eridge to Uckfield – lives, as part of the Oxted Line across Surrey and East Sussex.
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Two parts of the route have been reborn as heritage railways. The Lavender Line makes use of a single mile of track on the lower third, forging north-east from Isfield to a newly created stop (Worth Halt) on the banks of the River Uck. The Spa Valley Railway preserves the six-mile stretch that was decommissioned in 1985, making part-use of the old Tunbridge Wells West station; (the building is also a Wild West theme restaurant).
8. Waverley Line
Open November 1849 to January 1969
With the exception of the Great Central Main Line, the excising of the Waverley Line from the network was arguably the deepest Beeching cut. This 98-mile route was a grand exercise in British unity, linking Edinburgh to Carlisle across the ups and downs of the Scottish Borders. It was also a matter of persistence. The Waverley only connected Edinburgh to Hawick (in Roxburghshire) in its first burst of construction; the remainder of the route, over the ancient frontier and down into Cumbria, went unfinished until 1862.
Not always the busiest of services (ticket sales were generally poor along the sparsely inhabited Hawick-Carlisle section), the Waverley was not entirely loved either; even in the Victorian era, late trains led to regular passenger complaints. Its demise was not a surprise. Six of its stations had already shut by 1957, more than a decade before closure.
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Two different pictures have developed on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border. In 2015, the upper 35 miles of track, between Edinburgh and Tweedbank, were reopened as a modern train service, Borders Railway. A small slice of track, Whitrope Siding, has also been rebuilt as a heritage project.
By contrast, the English section of the route is largely a case of looking carefully and proceeding on foot. You can hike along the trackbed, next to the A7 and the river Esk, between Longtown and Netherby. The same vague path will take you through a swath of Cumbrian countryside, past the defunct Scotch Dyke station (now a private home, but the platform is visible), and on over the old Thistle Viaduct, which spans the Esk just beyond.
9. Durham-Bishop Auckland Line
Open April 1857 to May 1964
County Durham was one of the hotbeds of the British rail boom. It was, of course, the maternity ward of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) – which opened in 1825 as the world's first passenger railway to use steam locomotives. Durham-Bishop Auckland emerged from the network of track spawned by this feat of mould-breaking – and like the S&DR, it made much of its money by shifting coal from the region's collieries towards the docks on the Tees estuary. Its end, though, was sudden. Passenger services ceased even before the second Beeching report, and the track was lifted by 1968.
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Unlike the S&DR, which is now largely part of the Tees Valley Line – and is about to begin a nine-month programme of bicentennial celebrations – there are only faint traces of Durham-Bishop Auckland. Even in Brandon, whose colliery was one the line's key raisons d'etre, the junction of 'Station Road' and 'Station Avenue' now lacks the structure its names refer to. However, nine miles of the trackbed (between Brandon and Bishop Auckland) have been redeveloped as a rail trail – and make for a lovely summer's day walk.
10. Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway
Open August 1863 to March 1966
Unlike some of its Victorian counterparts, this 105-mile joining of the dots between the Bristol and English Channels was not a single vision brought to fruition. As its name hinted, the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway was an amalgamation of two earlier lines – the Somerset Central Railway and the Dorset Central Railway – to form a whole that was not always greater than the sum of its parts. While there is no doubt that the 'S&D' served a cross-section of the south-west (including its branch lines, it reached Bath and Burnham-on-Sea at the northerly ends of its route, and Bournemouth in the south), it did not always do so at a speed to its passengers' liking. So ponderous was its locomotives' progress through the Mendip Hills that its acronym was repurposed as 'Slow & Dirty' and 'Slow & Doubtful'. It was also failing before Beeching cast his eye on it, with some of the branches closing in the 1950s (though there were protests at its death all the same).
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Fragments of the railway remain in position. Bath Green Park station is now a thriving market hall. The Two Tunnels Greenway safeguards four miles of the route south of the city, including both the Devonshire and Combe Down Tunnels; the North Dorset Trailway plays a similar card as a 13-mile cycle path between Sturminster Newton and Spetisbury.
There are heritage projects, too. The Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust operates a mile of track at Midsomer Norton South station in Somerset. The Gartell Light Railway is a kindred spirit at Yenston (also in Somerset). And the North Dorset Railway is an ongoing labour of love; its team of volunteers hopes to run trains on restored track at Shillingstone in the near future.