All signals green

Gently tended by devoted staff, the country-station garden has become a rural idyll in its own right, says Andrew Martin

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IN early writing about railways, trains tended to kill people or destroy Nature.

In Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, they do both. In his poem of 1844, On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth asked: 'Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?'

Yet it turned out that railways rather suited the countryside. They carried crops to market and did not sully the landscape unduly. By the start of the 20th century, they were often depicted as bucolic. In The Railway Children, the porter, Perks, gives the children strawberries from his garden. They talk to him as they recline on the 'hot' grass of a railway bank. The country station was promoted as an idyll by the 100 or so railway companies of the time and many ran station-garden competitions. In 1900, The Railway Magazine noted that the North Eastern Railway (NER) gave out 200 guineas in prizes to green-fingered staff. A repeated winner was Castle Howard station in North Yorkshire (now closed). 'What traveller going from Scarborough to York has not admired the lovely station of the château of the Howards?' the magazine quipped.