tiger_moran | (no subject) (Reply)

Recently I crossed over (in a car) part of where the Great Central Railway used to run and felt indescribably sad

You can't see anything of it any more, new houses are right up against where the track used to be and the track bed is completely filled in with trees now. If it wasn't for the hump in the road and the sides of the bridge still being there you wouldn't even know a railway had ever been there and I don't suppose most people even then ever think about why there's a hump in the road there.

Also there's a road that runs practically parallel with the line and that too is unrecognisable. What was a quiet little road that ran alongside some allotments (I'm almost certain they were allotments anyway) and farm fields is now basically just a pavement for a completely new wider road they've built alongside that for yet more new housing.

As a child I rode along that part of the (then defunct) Great Central line on a pony; we had to have hacked along the line and turned back somewhere near the bridge (which I think is when we passed allotments). We rode along that little old road back towards the stables, and now I can't recognise any of it. It's doubly heartbreaking. I hate that getting older seems to involve so much grief over things that are long gone and will never be again, things I never even got to see or experience as well as things I did (because back then I had no awareness of what that actually was, I didn't know that was the Great Central Railway. But now I know and it breaks my heart, that I never got to see it properly, as well as that what was there even then is now long gone, and so is the riding school, and so are all those ponies and horses).