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None of the following is intended to encourage you to trespass, or to put yourself in harms way: especially, please do not venture onto railways that are in use, unless you have permission, and the associated training.
The last thirty years has seen many miles of the UK's railway system discarded: the resulting mess being treated not as a resource but dismantled piecemeal. The debris still litters country and city, in varying states of squalor, and only recently have organisations such as Sustrans, Groundwork or one of the Wildlife Trusts been able to tackle old railway routes in quantity, converting them where they can into 'Paths for People' or developing them as nature reserves. For the rest, they often remain, but without function: severed in a thousand places, in private ownership, their cuttings perhaps littered with domestic or farm refuse, bridges arbitrarily removed.
Looking for an opportunity to walk one of these routes, I was hoping to choose a fragment of the Great Central's line to London, built to pass trains to Europe through a channel tunnel, but now little more than an extended unofficial nature reserve at best.
Being part of the car-free economy, and the Railway's southern route being a public transport near-desert, obstructed this ambition. In 1989 though, having travelled to Oxford to hand a camping skiff over to customers (the skiff being 'Maegan' I think) the opportunity arrived. The weather was at least half set fair, and I had a couple of mid-week days to spare. The market town of Brackley was once on the railway, and being on a bus route from Oxford, off we went into an afternoon of blustery cloud-strewn sunshine. 'We' being myself, walking boots, OS maps, a rucksack containing a large lump of cheese and some apples, taken in case of dire emergency, a cycle light and a Rollei 35 camera ...
The bus set me down in Brackley's market, but rather than climb the street past the top of the town to the railway, I headed off to to meet with the viaduct. Well, its site. The viaduct itself had been swept away some years earlier, a particularly concussive year for the town as the structure was rather more well built than the demolition firm had hoped.
Approaching its site along the bypass that had severed it, cutting through its southern approach, I scrambled up the slope of the embankment to some smashed brickwork at its shoulder, the springing of the first arch: a singular relic of the lines largest viaduct. Shadowy crop marks in the land beneath the line hinted at the structure's foundations lurking below ground, while cloud shadows chased each other across the fields towards Turweston.
Following the line past the town I found a route round the small industrial estate that occupied the station. The cutting north of the station was impassible, being in the process of being filled, partly with what appeared to be dead elm trees. I took the course of a minor road parallel to the line and walked in the late afternoon sunshine. Overhead a light aircraft wheeled noisily away: it was replaced by the sight of an altogether larger aircraft at a higher altitude, an 'AWAACS' - its elliptical radome giving it an unearthly appearance in the clearing skies. The railway now appeared to be free of obstructions so, crossing the field to a gate on its boundary fence, I gained the track bed. Finding there a shallow cutting, several hundred yards of which was filling with a crusty-surfaced runoff from something bovine, an early introduction to the pleasures of walking this railway occurred when the crust gave way and I sank up to my knees in the matter beneath it. Later when looking for accommodation in Helmdon I would have cause to wish I had a change of clothes with me.
The cutting was crossed by a distinctive single-arched bridge that passed ungracefully overhead, and then the track climbed out of the mire and became an easy stroll across ballast and rabbit trimmed grasses, . Onwards and out of the cutting, views across the open country emerged, the distant whisper of aircraft, farm machinery and vehicles accompanied me as I followed the line north, wading through lush grass that hid the ballast. Drawing alongside the hamlet of Radstone, the line crossed a metal underbridge, intact and with fifty years or so of painters work peeling from the steel. A single inexplicable page, pristine but torn from a paperback novel, lay in the unmarked grass here. On from the bridge the line ran into another larger cutting and through this continued to rise to escape the evening shadows of a world that turned far faster, enfolding the excavation in the chill of a premature darkness.
Another blue brick bridge spanned the cutting, the shadows almost defeating the camera, but beyond the bridge sunlight returned, insects dancing in the warmer air while rabbits, grazing, melted into the cutting sides at my approach. With this arch came the feeling that the crest of a hill had been broached, then the track bed broadened and ran beneath a further bridge, a double arch with a broad central pillar - the remains of what had been Helmdon's station, a huge wasted site with the outline of the island platform buried in the undergrowth, watched over by the station house at a respectful distance.
I left the railway here for the road, taking time to pause in the village's churchyard lit by the low evening sunshine, before crossing back to the line via a footpath, the better to see Helmdon viaduct. The footpath passed beneath the embankment through a curiously restricted brick arch, a scramble attained the track bed once again high above the fields, and the western side of the viaduct glowed in the last rays of the sun. The line ran on, trackless but intact, clipping the northern horizon to disappear into the shadows of the next cutting. I felt a very strong conviction that the viaduct's crossing was to be held back until the morning, and turned from the shadowed path of the line to the edge of the bank.
In grave danger of being stranded in darkness among a hundred traps for the unwary, I picked my way off the embankment and into Helmdon village, my path lit by increasingly horizontal rays of sun that threw long shadows on the meadow. Helmdon has a public house, which seemed to be a good place to start looking for a night's bed and board. My appearance did raise a certain amount of alarm and despondency at first: a few years later all I would have needed would have been a rangy doleful string-tethered lurcher to transmit a stereotype which might have aroused more suspicions. However, the landlord did introduce me to an elderly gardener who in turn referred me to a house on the Wappenham road, the owners of which were prepared after thirty seconds of great surprise and two minutes of close questioning, to provide a good bed and a substantial breakfast, for which I am still grateful. I was able to myself comfortable - and rather cleaner - and retired exhausted to bed, reflecting on the pubs immediate conversations, talk of the railway, of Brackley's problems with viaduct demolition, of childhood routines, the daily walk to Helmdon's station and the brief run to Brackley and school, remembered though it was twenty six years since Helmdon's station closed.
The following morning found me under more of the dappled cloud-chased skies, breakfast out of the way, the couple's four year old child dissuaded from fraternising with the unknown who, sitting in their sunlit dining room with a healthy appetite, was on the inexplicable quest of 'walking the old railway line'. Goodbyes said, such possessions as I had, packed, I strolled through Helmdon's cool morning air in search of the line once again, and soon caught my first glimpse of the viaduct across meadows, the sun on its east side now, dropping its eight piers to the land as it had for almost a century.
Of the line's construction - this valley filled with workshops, contractors materials, for a few years a small village, there was now no sign. The railway's construction was extensively photographed by a Leicester man, S.W.A. Newton, and these have survived, hundreds of fragile plate glass negatives in the care of the Leicester Museums Service hold a record of the people who built this line in the last years of the last century, armed with archaic looking diggers representing the first earth moving machinery, battling though the mud of winter and the dust of summer. A dozen or so years later, with the start of the first world war, dust, mud and machinery would gain an altogether darker significance for many of these people and their children.
The following links to a picture of unconventional dimensions and this may give some browsers problems. Save other work before proceeding ...
Another scramble to the south end, and now I could see the line stretching away northwards, its course framed by the viaduct's parapet, a small arch bridge at the far end, and a larger structure flinging itself across the line at the horizon. Sheep close cropped the grass up here, occasionally the viaduct revealing the top of an arch through this covering, thickly tarred to keep the water out.
Crossing the viaduct, I approached the small arch bridge at its north end - built for two tracks only - much of the rest of the line's structures were laid out to carry four: the builders having correctly foreseen the twentieth century's continued growth in travel needs, could not have expected that their creation would not be at the resulting feast. In front of the bridge something was still in the grass, hoping to remain unseen. Twenty feet from the hare, I watched her: this creature that lives for much of the time alone, sleeps and raises her young on the face of the land, with no shelter, no burrow, no protection in numbers, living on her wits, speed, and physical strength. She eventually ambled away up the bank into the field alongside the line and, changing her mind, flew for cover, leaving me free to walk beneath the smoke blackened arch of the bridge and on through the sunlit cutting.
Progress here was easy, the cutting clear of anything but long grass, the stock fences that crossed it provided with gates or crossings on the line of the rails: still the next bridge seemed to recede as I walked towards it, a morning sunlit illusion. Its piers were surrounded by a neat bank that crossed the cutting beneath it - the arch partly filled but the job done with care. A repair to the brickwork was dated 1984, scribed in the drying mortar. On from here the going became decidedly worse, chest high vegetation was closing the way, and I spent half an hour battling though a mere hundred or so yards of cutting, a distance once crossed by the average express train without those on it drawing breath. The following vast embankment, Sulgrave, was injured at one point by a deep pit dug out of it, this I negotiated with care, but the following section was a delight in the mid morning sun, and finally, here, the distant sounds of traffic, aircraft and farm machinery which had followed me all morning faded, as if cued, to a near silence, allowing the gentle push of the breeze and distant bird song to hold the aural stage for a while. There are similar moments in music, but not many. The moment passed, with new voices from distant Sulgrave village to the west, then it was on through another clean cutting beneath an arch carrying Banbury Lane. Many of Southern England's roads, old and new, cross the Great Central at some point or other, though very few travellers notice the old line other than as an obstruction.
An industrial farm unit occupies the site of Culworth station, and obscures the most graceful bridge that spans the cutting beyond from view. I left the railway and detoured round the minor lane to the west, the lane drawing close to the railway once again before crossing it. The line's path here and in many other places is marked by scots pine trees, their distinctive outline punctuating the south midlands skies. The next section of line brought me to Culworth Junction.
This line, when closed, was regarded as the down stroke of a 'Y' shaped line to the capital, the two arms of the 'Y' resting in Liverpool, Manchester and in Immingham, and the tail, intended for Paris, in London - perceived as an unnecessary duplication and discarded. 
As has been emphasised by the author Colin Walker, it was actually an 'X' shape - with one foot of the X serving South Wales, the West Country, and the South Coast. When the Great Central was discarded, with it went a high quality route for freight and passenger trains between these places, that avoided the complexities and delays of Birmingham. With later closures, there is now no quality rail route for freight between Wales, the West Country, and the midlands. Culworth was a hub of this 'X' shape, with a line climbing towards me from the left. Here were remains of the railways 
control systems, signal posts and gantries, felled in the grass or stark on the skyline, with no observant eyes to check off these indexes as they whisked their trains north across the junction. Most of the signal box had vanished, a palisade of blackened railway sleepers forming its 
coal store leaned like a small henge monument, as eye catching as present day installation art though far less contrived. The line closed, the box survived another eight or so months before the demolition contractors reached it and simply set it ablaze as their first act when recovering the track here: it burned brazier-bright, as tinder dry painted wood will, a disturbing and violent end for a workplace focussed on the safe passage of all who passed it for sixty seven years.
The track bed north, crossed by a steel bridge, was causing me some anxiety - but a large, dark, and threatening figure beneath the bridge resolved itself into a not unfriendly horse as I approached. Beyond the bridge a steel gantry signal stood, very straight, guarding the vanished junction ahead. Shortly after this the track's continuity was abruptly broken at the site of an underbridge. Beyond this few yards descent onto the road, the line continued, clear once more.
To the north we were drawing close to a second meeting place for railways - Woodford Halse, where the company established extensive workshops and marshalling yards in a remote country location where land was cheap, the result being a small railway town of red brick terraces put down among the ironstone villages of Northamptonshire's uplands. Here again the line was thoroughly blocked, the great cutting through the junctions cleared of vegetation which had been placed between the abutments of the railway overbridge, and I left the railway to walk into the village on the roads, pausing on the bridge that some call 'Marble Arch' with its panoramic views of the junctions beyond, and the sweeping cutting to the south. A halt was very much looked for, and found in Woodford's public house. My appearance suggested that I'd been up to no good, so I volunteered the information that I'd walked the line from Brackley, which prompted a long discussion on its fate from the half dozen occupants of the bar.
After this break I strolled through the streets of Woodford Halse, the terraced cottages of various sizes: some with room for a piano - others rather smaller. Down Station Road, the line still crossed the road on two very solid immovable brick arches, but the opening that once gave access to the island platform above was meticulously bricked up. The Great Central's distinctive station design is practical in some ways, with the two running lines separating to pass either side of a single platform containing the station buildings: but access for passengers is questionable, stairs down from a portal perched draughtily in the middle of an overbridge, or upstairs from a gate darkly tucked beneath blue brick arches or pigeon infested girders carrying the line above. Much of the railway land north of the station is planted with trees that will grow to block Woodford's view, while north again a small industrial estate marks a late injection of alternative employment in this place that with the closing of the line lost its raison d'etre along with its paths to the outside world.
His father, tied to his work in London but concerned for him, and knowing of the ways of the Great Central, gave him a coin, with the instruction to keep it against the day he should find himself in dreadful trouble, when he should use it to call for assistance, and help would arrive. What X didn't appreciate was the speed with which he would could call down the gods ...
X was a small boy and the need for gods duly arose. He was exploring the country west of the village, crossing farmland: and an unfriendly farmer, who'd perhaps suffered at the hands of other evacuee children, challenged him very aggressively from across the fields and then saw fit to discharge a shotgun, near, though not at, him. He then threatened further retribution. Very shaken, X decided that it was time for that phone call.
'Go to the station and wait!' came back the instruction.
He'd hardly arrived at the station when under the bridge and through the junctions from London swept an express train as though specially ordered, and on it was his father. The subsequent visit to the farmer provoked more threats, so X's father saw fit to wrap the shotgun around a door lintel in best wild west tradition ... this episode, like many others involving evacuee children, can have done nothing to further understanding between town and countryside ...
From here the line ran for some way across level ground and for a few hundred yards all trace of it had disappeared. I made my way along a minor road, then a track, following its course towards Charwelton.
The track again converged with the line, passing through field gates. Hanging from one of these, and I was on a legitimate footpath for a change, was a dead and very noisome fox, enough to deter any casual walker. The gate circumvented, I made my way towards a telltale group of scots pines, and regained the railway by a small accommodation bridge, again making my way north along the line, now level, passing the remains of Charwelton water troughs. The brick base for the header tank survived after a fashion, while the track bed was a litter of concrete supports for some structure of other. Charwelton station bridge, a steel structure, had recently been cleared, and the A361 road cut through the railway on the level - the first major road crossing since Brackley. The station site beyond the bridge was flat, erased, the line entering the cutting leading to Catesby tunnel.
It was now mid-afternoon, the sun still shone, the sheltered cutting warm, grassy, a rich carpet of wild flowers dry underfoot, and I had considered turning back for a bus from Charwelton. Well: there was no bus, and the tunnel's cold breath proved too mesmeric, its entrance is now sealed more professionally but then was open, the far end a distant spark through two miles of clear air. You, valued reader, will not be encouraged by this account to explore underground without consent, and professional advice - mines are often filled with invisible and deadly gases, unsecured roofs and unexpected shafts, while railway tunnels old and new have been known to collapse ... suffice to say that having noted that Catesby tunnel is drained by a substantial adit in the middle of the invert, with deep manholes to this every fifty yards or so, and that the demolition contractors had rather damaged many of the manhole covers, I decided not to risk falling down one of these deathtraps and set off into the darkness tapping a short length of stick against one wall of the tunnel for additional security ...
As in canal tunnels, the entrance dropped behind while the far end grew no nearer. Though the occasional glazed blue brick had neatly spalled off its surface the majority of the tunnel appeared in good condition beneath its soot - save for a section where the drainage had been sufficiently wrecked that the tunnel was filled to a depth of a foot or so with cold clear spring water. This was uncomfortable, but did wash the precise bit of my clothing that was still noisome from the misadventures of the previous day. Of 'Repairs' supposedly carried out in the final years of the line but used to close it for a long series of Sundays, there was no sign, though in 3000 yards of soot darkened tunnel this was perhaps not surprising. The north end at last drew near, the warming air and light once again, the occasional small plant, then larger ones, and finally the open sky again.
I'd been in the tunnel for some time, and when I emerged, much of the virtue had bled from the afternoon light. Some distance over to my left was Catesby house, and before the tunnel entrance the three arched brick accommodation bridge with a distinctive lump knocked out of a shoulder of its centre arch - 
apparently the result of a misplaced fire iron on some long vanished steam engine. The remains of a lineside hut contained accurate advice in the graffiti on its walls. 
Old photographs of the line here reveal it to be immaculate, now the cutting was filling with smothering vegetation. I walked on to cross Catesby viaduct, of somewhat shaky appearance, with slots knocked through its parapet to provide cover for shooting parties.
The bridge that followed provided a vantage point for two more photographs of this heavily engineered part of the line, its descent from the tunnel and across Catesby viaduct, the first of two in a short stretch of line. Even in flat uninspiring light, the sight of the work involved here was most impressive. Here of all places it was possible to visualise the trains that had passed this way over this distinctive line, sixty seven years of extraordinary responsibilities, though not many could top Winston Churchill's passage in 1942, in a sleeper carriage, én route for Thurso and a secret crossing of the Atlantic, to a meeting that - for better and for worse - brought America into the war in Europe ... before I moved on, the vista here provoked thoughts on the fickleness of history's twists and turns - to build a work like this and discard it within a human lifetime.
Down to the track again, and on to a real problem. Staverton viaduct had been removed some time previously. The resulting void was actually unsettling to encounter after so much continuity. The structure had been erased, and crossing its site involved a scramble down to the small brook at its bottom and then up the other side, two very rough slopes apparently made up of shattered brickwork from the viaduct. Even more unhappily, the entire slope had been colonised by wasps nests. After twenty or so miles of relatively clean track bed, this was an unpleasant reminder of the realities of walking much more of this line. It was now descending into rather busier countryside, and experience had already indicated that where this line was accessible it would be the worse for encounters with present day Britain. With a few hours of light left it was time to think seriously about leaving, and I walked the last half mile of track bed to the Staverton Road crossing, and after a long glance at the railway, pursuing its course north, but more untidy, more eroded here, I climbed past the abutments of the destroyed bridge and back onto the roads.
The road to Daventry runs south east here, and as I walked there was a last view of the line as it left Catesby. By chance the sun illuminated its now distant relics and I was able to take a final photograph across the ripening wheat to the viaduct, a well placed run of notes on a musical stave, energizing the landscape.
The railway ran on, following its long ruined course up country, lengths of disjointed embankment, rusting motorway bridges, shattered stumps of brickwork, robbed metal, scarred posters in dank forgotten arches beneath Leicester's station: and then the length centred on Loughborough where the present day Great Central Railway tends the flame of the old company, developing this section as a vibrant working line, a centre of excellence for the engineering skills needed to support this activity, an industry test track, and even now a freight operation. This growing activity extends to the edge of Nottingham, but that city's substantial well placed station in its dusky chasm is long gone, and the utterly buried crossing of the coalfield beyond leads to the place where, very symbolically, the rails of this line were first severed, three days after it closed on the fourth of September 1966, to make way for the newly building M1 motorway crossing: at that time built with capacity for anything the country could demand of it. We thought.
Daventry is on top of a hill, and the last mile or so began to be heavy going, but eventually I plodded wearily beneath the town's ring road. Daventry on a mid week early evening was quiet. The hulk of a small steam locomotive in a small park, somewhat worn by climbers and with a blank piece of steel welded across the place where the controls would be, threw a bizarre twist onto the immediate past. Daventry still had a radio station at least ...
Finding that I couldn't face the longish walk to Long Buckby Station I found a taxi firm and was swept down the hill from the town at what seemed like dizzying speed. We passed over the remembered canal bridge at the foot of Buckby locks and then the straight and exposed road across the motorway - I'd last walked this several years previously, a night of wild rain and wind: 
I was meeting a boat guest who had come down from London for a weekend's escape from the intricacies of central London. Now I returned to the same station and a train to Milton Keynes for a connection. No one was about, both stations deserted, and a spot survey would have had Milton Keynes closed on the spot. Then an evening train arrived and the platforms filled with commuters from town. The London train pulled in, and we were off across the darkened Vale of Aylesbury to the Chiltern hills, towards London's bright skies once again, down through Berkhamstead's curves, across London, and back home.
This essay explores the line as it was in 1989. With further disruption of the route this walk is not likely to be as straightforward today, leaving aside the permissions that should be sought from the various landowners with a request for passage - none of this section will be a right of way. In particular, the cuttings along this line have been found to be an asset in that they can be used for landfill, several south of Brackley have been filled and the land restored, and planning permission was at one time sought for the run of earthworks north to Helmdon, so these may be no more. Similarly, embankments can contain useful material and be quarried away. Helmdon and Catesby viaducts do still stand, and now it appears at least possible that the railway may be restored in some form, notwithstanding housing development across it at Rugby among other places - even with current concern to protect former railway land the line's remaining structures still have not one whit of planning protection.
There's a perception that the line, once built, lost money for the company. This is probably untrue, though without its onward connection to the Continent it certainly did nothing to enthuse the shareholders. 'Money Sunk, Lost and Gone Completely' was an unfair jibe on a company which made a heavy investment in the future of 'UK PLC' in Europe. The first world war did harm the Great Central, with its brand new port at Immingham Docks facing a continent that was abruptly closed to further trade: while the second conflict like the first was won partly by virtue of the railways sacrificing the quality of their infrastructure to the cause, underpaid even at the time while their costs increased exponentially. They were rewarded when the post war years opened with a flood of ex-military drivers and lorries released onto the roads to set up transport firms that were able to cherry-pick freight contracts: the railways at one point threatened to turn into a steam-powered financial black hole. The low point in the fortunes of the industry saw unhappy attempts to sort out the mess using the inadequate accounting tools endemic within the railways: in an extraordinary chapter lasting less than ten years the Great Central's line had its services displaced or demolished, and in common with other lines it was closed, its alignment obstructed, and these closures did not stop the financial hæmorrhaging on the railways.
Proposals to revive the line surfaced soon after it was closed - it's been a regular feature of the transport plans of governments in opposition, not least when construction of a channel tunnel started in the nineteen seventies. Heavy obliteration of the route through Leicester and Nottingham has denied the northern end any reuse, and the remaining section between the two cities is now a most evocative preservation project.
In 1991 the Central Railway Group proposed a supergauge lorry on train freight link using the line, and this proposal, modified, is still being progressed after a defeat in parliament in 1996.
More recently, Chiltern Railways, as a condition of its renewed franchise on services from Marylebone, has been charged by the SRA with completing a study into using the line to provide services serving London from what could be marketed as 'Parkway One' - a very well placed parkway station at the junctions of the M1 and M6, that could also serve the East Midlands if the line were extended to Leicester.
Waiting distantly in the wings is the SRA's ambition for a new North-South high speed rail link ...
Also thoroughly part of the present, and future, of this line, are the reopened sections at Loughborough and now Ruddington. If you've enjoyed this resource, a visit to the Great Central Railway at Loughborough will complement it. Here you can visit living examples of stations similar to Helmdon's vanished buildings some forty five miles south. The GCR railway's website has more information.
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Great Central Railway Centenary 1899 - 1999
