Home on Rail, by Lewis Collard

Watlington (Magdalen Road) station

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:30 +0000

On here, I write about railways. It is, shall we say, a very specific kind of person who would do that. That sort of person (me) has a tendency to get bogged down in minutiae; what things went where at what time travelling on what things commanded by who, and that’s where the general audience falls asleep.

And that’s why I try to do things a bit differently here. What’s still here? What was here? How does what is here connect to what was here? And what does the difference between the two mean? If I answer those questions well enough, I might be able to make a web page about a minor station in a village in Norfolk interesting.

M&GN bridges over the River Nar

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 02:06:23 +0000

There are two bridges over the River Nar just south of the A47 bridge over the same. Here’s a younger, somewhat thinner me sitting on one of them some time in 2007.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been doing this a while.

M&GN bridge over the Fen Line

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:13:02 +0000

Travelling in to King’s Lynn on the Fen Line, about 500 metres before the A47 flyover (15-20 seconds at typical line speeds), the traveller who has tired of looking at their phone and watches the much better view out the window of the left side of the train will see this bridge abutment.

From a distance, though, and especially at the 70-odd miles per hour trains run through this section, the most obvious tell that there was a railway here is the stretch of embankment.

Semaphore signal on the Harbour Branch

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:48:44 +0000

If you regularly travel down the Nar Ouse Way you may have spotted this concrete semaphore signal over on the grass, or in the wasteland, or whatever that area was when you last saw it. The below photo was from 2021, when it was not quite the wasteland it was in previous years but had not been landscaped yet.

I’ve been aware of the signal for a while. I first found it in 2006; back then, access was a lot more difficult, requiring pushing a security fence out of the way. I probably have a photo of the signal itself somewhere, but the one I digitised all those years ago was of a very short section of rail and ballast (on the junction side of the signal).

British Rail clock in the browser

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:31:27 +0000

The clock itself is here! Click or tap or whatever you do on your device.

This is a recreation of a British Rail analogue clock in HTML, CSS and Javascript. It is intended to be faithful to the design outlined in the original British Rail Corporate Identity Manual, and hopefully faithful to at least some of the clocks that were made in the real world.

This should work in all modern web browsers, mobile & desktop. Bug reports are welcomed.

Casey Jones bridge over the Nar

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:12:14 +0000

This was a bridge known as the “Casey Jones” bridge over the River Nar. It sat next to the “new” A148 road (the Nar Ouse Way) between the A47 Saddlebow roundabout and the South Gates roundabout.

Photo by the late Ray Bullock, 2006.

It got that name because it looked rather like a miniaturised version of a wooden American bridge; the sort of thing you could imagine a steam locomotive with an oversized chimney and cow catcher lumbering over. Someone at some point in time associated “it looks American” with the famous American locomotive driver from the song, and the name stuck among the sort of people who like that sort of thing.

Magdalen railway remnants

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 01:10:58 +0000

In early 2021, word came my way that Highways England’s Historical Railway Estate were looking to demolish several former railway structures. One of those structures was very close to me - close enough to make a rather nice early morning walk. So I wandered down to visit a pair of bridge abutments on Stow Road in Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen that were at risk of demolition in the very near future, to photograph them for posterity (all these pictures have a long-term home on Wikimedia Commons, in full resolution).

Concrete bridge on High Road & the site of South Lynn station

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 06:31:50 +0000

If you have ever walked from the Saddlebow Roundabout on the A47 towards the Saddlebow Industrial Estate on the edge of King’s Lynn, you may have noticed this curious little concrete bridge over nothing.

This one could count as a secret, because if you only go over it in a car you’ll never notice it, and if you do notice it you might not guess it is a railway bridge. But it’s actually the closest thing we have to a remnant of South Lynn station itself.

Bridge over Puny Drain near Harbour Junction

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 07:27:03 +0000

Very close to Harbour Junction, in the shadow of the A47 bypass, is this very small concrete-and-steel bridge in not such a great state of repair.

This is not a railway bridge, as in a bridge which would have railway tracks going over it. Its proximity to Harbour Junction and its rather beefy-looking railings have caused people to assume that it is; old maps and the bridge’s construction say otherwise. But we can see some kind of railway-related purpose for it.

Downham Market station

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:51:42 +0000

Let’s get straight to the good part: Network SouthEast.

The Network SouthEast signage at Downham Market is not from the Network SouthEast era. It appeared some time in early 2017, and that was the best surprise I ever had on my commute to Cambridge. It was not for purely nostalgic reasons that I was delighted, though of course there was that too (Network SouthEast was a significant part of my childhood). I was pleased that Network SouthEast was getting some of the public recognition it deserved.

B558090, the stray wagon on Wisbech Road

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:20:10 +0000

When I first visited King’s Lynn in 1999, I saw a disused railway wagon behind some Heras fencing, near the newsagent I was visiting on Wisbech Road to pick up my copy of Kerrang (I was that kid). I thought, “that’s odd”, then forgot about it, and only started thinking about it a few years later. Digital cameras were expensive back then, mobile phones certainly didn’t have cameras attached to them even for the people that could afford those (which wasn’t me), and I hadn’t developed an interest in photography which would have me using a film camera. And I hadn’t really developed my interest in railways; I thought trains were pretty neat and that was it.

Signal KL38, trap points, and track remnants

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 01:57:22 +0000

Last visit: 2023. Be aware that this signal and the long-disused and long-disconnected rails are technically on Network Rail land. Nobody is going to notice or care if you stay far away from the nearby active main line. Please be sensible!

I write elsewhere about the bridge very near this signal, and that article gives some background on the short spur from Harbour Junction to the site of South Lynn station. You will want to read those articles first for the historic background.

A platelayer's hut

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:45:29 +0000

This is a small lineside hut on the outskirts of King’s Lynn, very close to the bridge that took the former Midland & Great Northern tracks over the current Fen Line. At the right time of year, such as the April in which I took the photo, it is rather beautifully surrounded by reeds.

There are plenty of these at the side of many railway lines, of very similar construction; there’s at least one more exactly like this within the boundaries of King’s Lynn, and several more scattered down the Fen Line. And like probably every other train commuter, I occasionally harbour fantasies of offering some sort of rude gesture to society at large, throwing away the computer (or perhaps acquiring a small solar panel), and making one of these my very small home. Wouldn’t that be nice? (And impractical. Also illegal! Besides, society is actually pretty OK; I like people.)

March station

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 23:14:26 +0000

Rail Alphabet is my favourite typeface. It was everywhere on the railway network for decades; for people over a certain age, its shapes say “railway” almost as surely as a double-arrow symbol does, and as surely as “Transport” says “road”. It was so ubiquitous that one could associate that typeface with railways even if you do not know it is a distinct, single-purpose typeface - a fact I only learned in recent years thanks to Nick Job’s beautiful digitisation of the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual.