Even today, if you should travel to the far north-eastern end of the Central Line, the hanging baskets on the platform at Epping and the quietude of the rural surroundings feels incongruous enough. It’s very difficult to imagine that the Tube once went even further than this.
As if the existence of North Weald and Ongar weren’t odd enough, until October 1981 there was a stop in-between these two outposts called Blake Hall, which held the record for the lowest number of daily users of any Tube station on the network; a grand total of six. Such was the isolation that the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman once enquired about the possibility of living in the station master’s house.
But perhaps even the doyen of “Metroland” found Blake Hall a little too remote. What’s more certain is that, 30 years on from the last Tube train leaving Ongar and North Weald stations, it’s now possible to travel on this arcane bit of line again, albeit on a vintage British Rail train rather than in a Tube carriage.
A Tube journey like no other
My recent trip began at Epping Tube station, where an early 1960s double-decker bus painted bright green took me and a three-dozen-strong crowd of families and couples (and a distinct lack of thermos-wielding anoraks) to the revived Ongar station.
The station building, all stout brick and polished tiles, looks like a place that Dr Beeching simply found too hard to reach in order to close it down, rather than somewhere that was on the London Tube network until the mid-1990s.
There’s a small display with photographs of the last Tube train departing on the night of Sep 30, 1994, with a slew of press and public amassed on the platform. The last night of Ongar may have been the busiest since the station joined up with the Underground network in 1949.
The journey to North Weald, past Blake Hall (Betjeman’s desired station building is now a private home and not part of the revived heritage line) isn’t suburbia; it is unabashed Essex countryside. As the blue and white train departs, we pass ironing-board flat, ploughed farmers’ fields. We pass forgotten foot crossings, low bridges, and sidings festooned with grass that rustles like banknotes. What’s most miraculous is that this was ever considered to be a part of London, however tenuously, in the first place.
“I rode on the branch during the last night in 1994 with my daughter Helen, then aged 13,” explains Roger.
“As the very last train pulled out of Ongar, I explained to her that trains had departed from here every day for almost 130 years and that was the last ever one. When she became upset, I consoled her by saying: ‘Oh, I expect someone will turn it into a heritage railway one day’, never thinking for a minute that this person would be me.”
A railway line brought back to life
Roger now owns this former slice of London Underground track. After retiring in 2007 from what he calls his “modest bus operation” in north-east London (actually the substantial Blue Triangle firm), he became a minority shareholder in a company that put the case for running trains on the now abandoned line.
Millions of pounds and tens of thousands of free volunteer working hours later – along with rebuilt and restored infrastructure; lower track beds; and heritage locomotives, signalling, and rolling stock having been bought – the Epping Ongar Railway opened to the public in May 2012.
On board, I’m starting to warm to the striped orange and brown seat patterns, designed by someone who I can only assume was going for a “tanning lotion and Bovril” colour scheme. Less retina-scratching colours are available outside as we chug past the drooping branches of beech trees and silver birches. I can’t spot any pheasants but I do spot a tractor in a distant corner of a field just outside North Weald station.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/england/essex/the-countryside-tube-stops-that-disappeared-off-the-map/
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Publish date : 2024-01-21 03:00:00
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