It is one of a number of stations which, for one special reason or another, are kept open. Some of these stations are 'mothballed' - kept open with a sparse service, in case a local housing or industrial scheme ever gets past the planning stage - in which case, the station will be needed. One such is Pilning in Gloucestershire, a little north of Bristol, in the countryside near the Severn Tunnel. I went to see it in March 2014. It was a well-maintained ghost station, which had trains thundering through several times an hour, but just one stopping train each way on Saturdays.
Click on the following maps and pictures, to see the detail.
Since 2014 there have been changes. The footbridge and westbound platform have gone, so that one can arrive and depart only on eastbound trains. Unfortunately the strict height-clearance needs of the London to South Wales Electrification meant demolishing the footbridge and the platform, so that a passenger from, say, Bristol must now travel under the River Severn to Severn Tunnel Junction (in Wales), then back again to Pilning - a ludicrously roundabout journey!
To discourage passenger usage still further, there is now only one train a week, eastbound, on Saturday afternoons, which will get you to Bristol Temple Meads station in twenty minutes. Mind you, that train might well be the fastest travel method into central Bristol! Cost? £4.20 single. Obviously, there is no return service on the same day. (Not for another week, actually)
Here are the Pilning passenger-ticket figures for the three most recent years available:
2014/15 68
2015/16 46
2016/17 230
The 2016/17 figure was a 'blip' - there was local agitation for the station to be made two-platform again, and with a proper train service. Clearly people had deliberately been patronising it, to bump up the usage figures. And I dare say rail enthusiasts from all over the South West went there (by train, naturally) to take a look.
And yet, even with its truly dire train service, Pilning is not the least-used station in the country. That honour goes decisively to Shippea Hill, whose passenger-ticket figures make Pilning look positively seething with travellers:
2014/15 22
2015/16 12
2016/17 156
Shippea Hill's 2016/17 figure is also a 'blip', but this time because the station was briefly in the news and efforts were made to lure people to it by train, as a tourist stunt. No doubt its recorded passenger usage will slump to 12 again for 2017/18.
Gosh, only twelve people a year - one a month. Was it the same person all the time? If so, what was the purpose of his or her monthly tryst?
Because the A1101 is close by, I'm sure that many people drive there, to see what all the fuss is about. As I did. But of course, they leave no trace of their visit, apart from any photos they may publish afterwards. As I now have.
Strangely, the station has been there a long time. It was opened in 1845 as Mildenhall Road - Mildenhall being a small town miles away to the south-east - then the name was changed in 1885 to Burnt Fen, and finally, in 1904, to Shippea Hill. The old railway company must have struggled to come up with a meaningful name, and it's difficult even now to see what else you could call it.
This is featureless, big-field farmland, devoid of obvious physical features, with very little in the way of dwellings nearby - certainly no village. The line does cross the A1101 road here, midway between Littleport and Mildenhall, but it's not a major route, and the level crossing is of no significance.
There is indeed a 'Shippea Hill', off to the west, with a farm of that name plonked on it - but the 'hill' is only a very slight rise in the land, a mild unnoticeable bump in a vast area of flat fields bounded by sluggish drainage channels.
Actually, much of the farmland hereabouts is actually below sea level, and has been reclaimed from ancient wetland. If the river-dykes ever failed, the area for miles around Shippea Hill station would be submerged beneath a few feet of water. I suppose the platforms at the station itself might just about remain dry, but you'd be marooned. And even the top of Shippea Hill, off to the west, would barely be seen above the lapping water: a low-lying island once more.
It's really hard to understand why the station was ever built in the first place, and why it has lasted. It was never, for example, a railway junction. Perhaps it was for a long time a convenient place for the farmers to take delivery of their fertiliser and seed, and to dispatch whatever they grew. But more recently? How did it escape Dr Beeching's comprehensive line and station closures in the 1960s? After all, his axe fell very heavily on East Anglia. There was a wholesale dismantling of unprofitable lines, and extensive pruning of poorly-patronised stations.
Well, this one survived the Beeching onslaught. My best guess is that until the level-crossing became remotely-controlled, a manned signal box was required. And stations tend to be built - and maintained - wherever manned signal boxes are. The station at Shippea Hill couldn't have been created to serve a population centre of any kind. Here's a set of maps, at increasingly larger scales, to show how little human habitation there is around this station.
The station isn't in a completely empty landscape, but everyone with a farm job or agriculture-related business in the vicinity will come and go by bike, car, van, truck, tractor or lorry, using the A1101. There is no bus service. There's an outside chance that a few serious walkers using the Hereward Way (a long-distance footpath, named after post-Conquest marshland hero Hereward the Wake) will pass by, but surely no ordinary member of the public will voluntarily foot it here and wait for a train.
The train service is absolutely minimal, although better than Pilning's. Here is the current timetable. And this is what a footsore traveller will see, if hoping to catch a train.
You can click on that to enlarge the detail, but I'll summarise it for you. Mondays to Saturdays: a morning train from Cambridge to Norwich leaves at 0727; an evening train from Norwich to Cambridge at 1927; nothing on Sundays. All arrivals and departures are by request only - you must tell the train crew if aboard the train, or signal to them if on the platform. They will probably look at you with pity in their eyes.
So why did I go there? Well, I'm no stranger to out-of-the-way stations and like to take a look at them. Readers may recall, for example, my post called The Heart of Wales Line on 22nd August 2016. Sugar Loaf station was one of the remoter stations on that line, and I made a point of going to see it last year, as recounted in Sugar Loaf on 26th November 2017. Lonely stations tucked away in open countryside draw me like a magnet, as much as ancient churches and stone circles do. And for similar reasons: the special atmosphere; and what I can make of them photographically.
And although people's individual motivations may differ, I am certainly not alone in seeking out the more unusual of Britain's 2,500-odd railway stations. Thus I occasionally encounter people who are not rail passengers on the platforms of these places. Like me, they are intensely curious, and eager to make a photographic record of their visit.
I am not deliberately working my way through a long list of must-see stations, ticking them off one by one. My visits are haphazard, simply part of a day out. But some people do it with a Big Project in mind. Such as Geoff Marshall and Vicki Pipe, who were in the news last year for raising £38,500 to fund a visit to every station in Great Britain. It was a YouTube video in episodes, called All The Stations. I mentioned this project of theirs in my post Station Hopping on 27th June 2017. Since then, they have been visiting all the least-used stations in every county. Here they are, for instance, on 22nd April 2018, in a train on The Heart of Wales Line at Cynghordy, on the way to Broome station in Shropshire.
I'm afraid I beat them to it. I saw Broome in 2014 - see my Station Hopping post.
I've mentioned this couple before, not just in Station Hopping, but in a much older post (now no longer published on my blog) on 5th January 2014, The ghost train of Newhaven Marine. It strikes me that sooner or later I shall turn up at some little-frequented station in a rarely-visited part of the countryside and find them both there, plus whatever friend they might have along as 'supporting film crew'. They won't know who I am, but I will certainly introduce myself as a fan of theirs. Who knows, I may end up with a cameo role in one of Geoff Marshall's railway videos, of which there are very many indeed on YouTube.
Geoff has put some information on 'least used' stations up on the Internet. For instance, this map of the least-used stations for each county in England:
Over the years, I've been to a number of the stations shown on that map...
Acklington (2017)
Havenhouse (1998 and 2017)
Broome (2014)
Shippea Hill (2018)
Pilning (2014)
Finstock (2016)
St Andrew's Road (2014)
Bruton (2017)
Longcross (1979)
Thornford (1997 and 2017)
Beaulieu Road (1970 and 2017)
Doleham (1993 and 2004)
Sampford Courtenay (2014)
Coombe Junction (1983 and 2010)
...and quite a lot of others that if not the least-used in their county, most certainly qualify for a runner-up prize.
I've discovered that Geoff Marshall and Vicki Pipe visited Shippea Hill on 2nd June 2017, and shot this video for YouTube. It's interesting, because not only does it give a very good idea of what the station is like (including from the air - they must have used a drone), but it has a family connection: Vicki's great-grandfather was a signalman here. See
They also went to Pilning - and caught that Saturday train. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QXdtEOeoAg.
What does all this digression demonstrate? I suppose I'm saying that, while not by any means a 'railway nerd', I am nevertheless well-qualified to savour whatever the attractions of Shippea Hill might be.
So here we go. This is what I found on arrival one afternoon in mid-June.
It was next door to a depot of some kind, but nothing noisy was happening there. It was fairly peaceful, and once out on the platforms and away from the road, I barely noticed the light passing traffic. But there was nothing of that feeling of remoteness and timelessness that you sometimes get with such out-of-the-way places. And you could hardly say that the station itself, or its surroundings, were attractively bucolic. I was rather disappointed.
And although it was devoid of passengers, trains raced through. In the short time I was there - hardly ten minutes - three trains made the level-crossing barriers come down, two from the west, one from the east. I wonder what the people aboard those trains thought if they noticed me. Did they shake their heads sadly, knowing that I had eight hours to wait for the next train to anywhere?
Look! Two trains passing each other in the distance at the least-used station in Great Britain!
The show was over. I'd caught no less than three trains on camera in a short space of time, but otherwise the visit was lacking in thrills. 'Ah well,' you might say to me, 'At least you had the place to yourself.' True; but I would actually have liked to chat with someone else, someone who had come here in the same spirit of tourist curiosity, to see what they thought of this place - and whether it really deserved all the hype. Because to my mind, it doesn't.
Well, what about buying a ticket as a souvenir? That would be something. But there was no ticket machine. Sigh.
Footnote
My friend Angie has drawn my attention to this ultra-comprehensive post about Shippea Hill - see https://pocketbookuk.com/2016/01/13/shippea-hill/. Everything you might wish to know about its history is there. It makes my own post look flimsy and speculative! Apart from my photos, I suppose.
How interesting. I visited Shippea Hill as one of the 40 stations across the UK included in my book Remote Stations, which was published this months. I arrived on the train about 7.45am, ate my breakfast on the station, then walked the 8 miles back to Ely. https://petercatonbooks.co.uk/books/remote_stations/
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