Wickham Market railway station is actually in Campsea Ashe, four kms. east of the eponymous small town. It is indeed rather strange to come across an apparently working railway station, as it were in the middle of nowhere. Yet it is a station of some substance, as witnessed by the bridge alongside it carrying the B1078 road over the East Suffolk Line, a piece of landscape furniture rarely enjoyed by this railway.

It can be seen, not a thing of great beauty, behind the arriving  ‘Silver Bullet’-type up-train to Ipswich (below right). Gone are the days when the railway-writer would luxuriate in such a train being ‘hauled’ by a 2-6-4 or whatever. Now, far less romantically, the front two carriages are pushed and the back two dragged by a diesel power unit in the middle.

 

The empty platform for this ‘up’ train to Ipswich calls into question the need for the disembodied voice which, god-like, urges all would-be passengers as they arrive to spread themselves along the whole length of the platform to maintain ‘social distancing’ and avoid crowding in parts of the train. About five people were travelling on this particular train. No-one disembarked or boarded at Campsea Ashe for Wickham Market.

 

 

 

But in days of much yore, a long time ago, ’twas otherwise. WIckham Market Station, despite being somewhere else, has form – as a prominent plaque explains:

 

And in addition to having been a Junction, probably with its own Fat Controller I would imagine, this historic site also has its own little niche in history because 1952, the date on which the branch line was closed, was a good decade before the infamous Beeching cuts to which the uninformed would be inclined to attribute the closure.

 

I’m guessing here but probably it was in the 1960s that the station was downgraded Beeching-wise, losing Platform 2 and one of its two ‘iron-roads’. The up-line was just in front of the young woodland in the background of the photograph (left) and the ruinous platform, now sprinkled with primroses, remains under the trees and scrub. Even I remember the semi-derelict appearance of the station ten and more years ago; and I remember too reading about a mighty community effort not only to rescue it but to restore it to its modest former appearance. That is the real point of the photograph, taken in March 2021, showing the ‘Japanese’ detailing mentioned in the plaque and the overall good condition of the station building.

But the even more important significance of the ‘restoration’ was that the local community found a new use for the building. To achieve this is real success for, while sticking an old building together is often do-able, finding a viable use for it is usually difficult even though everybody knows that using a building is the best way of preserving it. What do you do, however, with a railway station building on the edge of a village in rural Suffolk with two trains an hour?

The answer:

 

 

And so far it has worked, even though the pandemic has meant that it has not been possible to use the meeting rooms and cafe since early 2020. But here is the magic of this place in action: if you go round to the ‘back’ of the station building, overlooking the car-park, you can find, often marked by a short queue, a small window which gives straight into the kitchen; and there you place your order for a snack or takeaway meal of delicious, home-made food. The soups are to die for, and the bacon rolls will persuade you that life is worth the living after all. You can even order the cakes for your wedding or funeral if you give enough notice. But for me the surreal element is that here, in the middle of almost nowhere, I can order a black Americano from a lady who seems to be there all hours, and be given a lovely drink from a real expresso machine. Who cares whether it’s in Wickham Market or Campsea Ashe?

The East Suffolk Line is a thing, if not of beauty, then of infinite wonder. It wombles its way from Ipswich to Lowestoft, a journey not many people seem to want to make, particularly during this last year when the train has often carried literally only one or two passengers. Yet its continued existence is vital for special groups of travellers like musicians going to Snape Maltings and students going to college at one end or the other. Above all, it is East Suffolk’s link with the outer world, connecting at Ipswich with trains bound for London. Oh, and with the country’s largest container port at Felixstowe, and – though its map can’t quite bring itself to show this – with Ely and its great cathedral, and with Cambridge.

The rolling stock seems entirely inappropriate for such a rustic line. It is brand new, and has greatly increased the efficiency of the service; but passengers look at it twice before boarding, wondering whether such a stream-lined,  surrealist apparition will really go to Oulton Broad South or Wickham Market, actually at Campsea Ashe. First impressions are that here is a train which took a wrong turn somewhere and has sped into Westerfield from the Swiss Alps or Japan. And how can it really go anywhere when the power unit, which we used to call the engine, is in the middle, jammed between the carriages? And how can you tell in which direction it might go when there is no knowing which is the front and which the back?

Is this train arriving or departing? Have you arrived just in time to catch it or have you just missed it?

 

And then there is Wickham Market………….

Aldeburgh on the east Suffolk coast is at its best before 10 am on a Sunday morning, especially in winter. Only a few people dodder along the near-deserted main street, and Crag Path, the parallel road along the sea front, is almost completely devoid of the holiday makers who so often make one wince by their insistence, whatever the weather, on wearing shorts just because they are on holiday beside the sea.

Yesterday, 24 January, there were no inappropriate shorts because there were indeed few legs to wear them. Just as well, for it was icy cold after a hard frost in the early hours. A curious phenomenon was the result: the vast expanse of deserted, pebble beach, normally ochreous brown, was thinly white, as this photograph rather inadequately tries to show:

 

The whiteish cover on the grass in the foreground gives the explanation: it is frost, and it is frost which had given the whole beach this very thin, superficial white covering. Perhaps this happens frequently at Aldeburgh; I don’t know, but the presence of frost all over the beach right beside the salty sea seemed in general to be sufficiently interesting to be worth a few pixels.

More characteristic of the place is the way sky and sea visually merge in a layering of greys and pale blues. Personally I just love the image of those pulled-up, overwintering boats with no-one around them. Indeed, there was no-one on the beach, in shorts or otherwise.