Meerkat Prompts: Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting
Not too far away from me – well, relatively speaking – is the Epping Ongar Railway. This is a slice of railway heritage that’s more or less in my backyard, and it harkens to a time when the London Underground’s Central Line went further east, into the heart of Essex. Nowadays, the line terminates at Epping, but once upon a time there were awkward shuttle services to Ongar from Epping, owing to single-track lines and for a time, the lack of electrification. Shorter platforms meant shorter trains as well, hardly practical for a service as busy as the Tube.
First stations were closed, and then the branch from Epping to Ongar was axed, in 1994. Following this turn of events, the line was purchased by a company aiming to turn it into a heritage railway, and that’s what it is today.
Because the line links to a Tube line, heritage trains can’t call at Epping station itself. There are proposals for the heritage company to build its own Epping station, close to the Tube station, which would also provide a convienient interchange between the two. In fact, there are calls from residents groups in the area about the reopening of the route as a bonafide branch of the Central Line.
If the line reopened then the uniquely preserved and restored stations and the time and effort pumped in by the heritage company might become an issue. It would be more or less impossible to run heritage services alongside a busy London Underground service, given how frequent Tube trains usually run. Public interest would be best served by the Tube extending back to Ongar, but the train enthusiast in me would be gutted to lose a rather gorgeous set of stations and steam locomotives. I guess London Underground could preserve the buildings, but that classic rolling stock would be stabled.
All of these plans are years away from fruition, if they ever pan out at all, but there’s an old saying: ‘you snooze, you lose’. I really ought to get myself to this little local slice of railway history before it’s too late!
‘Kat Comments