Beeching, Before and After

[steepholm]

Back when your granny was a wee lass, there was a small railway station at Ashley Hill in Bristol, just where Ashley Down meets Purdown, and in the shadow of the Muller orphanages. It looked like this:



Later, Dr Beeching (or a similar functionary, but let him stand for all, a la Judge Jeffreys) closed the station, and so it remained for many a year. The orphanages were by this time part of Brunel College, and were then converted to flats, while in their grounds had little houses built on them, in one of which I lived from 2006 until 2020. For much of that time, there was talk of re-opening the station under the name Ashley Down, and whenever it came up we were a little excited and a little nervous, but only a little because we never thought it would actually happen.

It did happen, yesterday. To celebrate the event, I took a two-minute journey from Stapleton Rd to visit the new, clean, yet untagged station. Not railway station, as in old-fashioned British English, not train station, as in US English, but "rail station". This is the shining new world we live in.










I felt a little self-conscious, I admit, photographing train things like an otaku in an anorak, but I was far from alone. The only depressing bit was this bench-cum-misericord, presumably designed like this to deter homeless people (because if only we didn't encourage them they wouldn't insist on being homeless?), but equally deterrent of passengers, I imagine.

Comments

[sovay]

I never watched the series, but listening to the theme song just now it seems to owe something to the music-hall standard, 'Oh Mr Porter'.

It is absolutely a filk of "Oh! Mr Porter," which is why it is so catchy.

(spatch went through a phase of David Croft earlier this year and watched Hi-de-Hi!, You Rang, M'Lord?, and Oh, Doctor Beeching! which I did not all watch with him because from that much television I would implode, but I did learn the theme songs.)

[steepholm]

spatch is clearly a more devoted Croft fan than I am, though Dad's Army and Are You Being Served still hold places in my heart (separate ventricles, obs).