13th January 2020 · Disused Stations

Presenter: Alan Young

Many members will be familiar with the disused station website (disused-stations.org.uk) and so it was with eager anticipation that those attending our first meeting of 2020 waited for the formal announcements to end and the presentation by Alan Young to begin! Alan is one of the small but dedicated and hard-working group which has steered the disused stations project from its beginnings in 2004. He began by detailing what information might be found on the website and then tackled the knotty problem of defining what the term ‘disused station’ was taken to include. He illustrated the dilemmas of categorisation with examples drawn both from our own South Yorkshire area and others having a personal meaning for him (Alan originates from Tyneside but now lives in Lancashire). After visually illustrating the members of the website team and enumerating the resources and databases that they use to develop the site Alan took us on a long and ‘haphazard’ (his word) tour of station sites showing the sheer variety of railway architecture, stages of dereliction and geographical locations that had been covered.

It was a fascinating journey but all too soon he was beaten by the clock and we had to draw proceedings to a close. An excellent afternoon and one that we would enthusiastically recommend to other branches.