The Romance of a Railway Home

Anna and Mark Gudge bought Long Melford Station in 1994 for £100,000, renovated it, and after 17 years are selling the house for £495,000 ($781,112.50 at today's exchange rate) - Date/Photographer unknown.
 

Long Melford Suffolk England United Kingdom - It all started in Victorian times. "One of my forebears was the stationmaster of King's Cross Station," says Anna Gudge. "It was a prestige job in those days. He used to wear a top hat and tails, and roll out the red carpet for the Queen. He became a big part of family folklore."
 
Anna never learnt her ancestor's name, but she certainly inherited his passion for railways. She grew up in the fifties, in a house beside the old Cavendish station in Suffolk, and her childhood was filled with steam trains. "When I was five or six, I made friends with the stationmaster next door and his wife," she says. "I would spend hours sitting in the signal box helping him change the points." His wife would bring them "weak tea and biscuits", she recalls, then she would "toddle home again".
 
After Anna was married in 1968, she and her husband moved into a disused level crossing house just down the line from her childhood home. "It was a tiny two-up, two-down, with a bathroom tacked on to the back," she recalls. "It was cramped, but also idyllic." This was a prelude for what was to come. Years later, in October 1994, Anna and her new partner Mark spent £100,000 on an entire 1865 railway station, Long Melford, two stops down from Cavendish, to convert into a family home.
 
Although Anna had never visited the station before, she remembered seeing it from the train window when she travelled to London with her father. The last train had departed in 1967. A rudimentary conversion had then been carried out and the property had been used as a bus station and a kennel for greyhounds.
 
By the time Anna and Mark arrived, it was derelict. "We had to do a complete slash and burn of the garden," says Anna. "Half the tiles were missing from the roof, and it smelled awful."
 
The property comprised the station building itself, a platform with a set of waiting rooms, and the gap where the train tracks used to be, in which a bizarre attempt had been made to install a swimming pool. But this had never been completed and was "a nasty, black puddle".
 
To Anna and Mark, this was a dream come true. "The potential just sang at us," says Anna. "We knew it would be enormous fun." They moved in almost straight away and threw a bonfire party on the old train tracks, fuelling the flames with the boxes they had used for packing. The following morning, their first granddaughter was born.
 
The couple embarked on a stage-by-stage renovation of the entire property. The gully where the tracks used to run had been filled with rubble. They added topsoil and cultivated a lawn. They cleaned out the swimming pool, modernised it, and got it going. They rebuilt the roof, restored old walls that had been knocked down, and raised the ceilings back to their original height. Finally, it was time for the interiors.
 
"We wanted to maintain the feel of the railway station," says Mark, "but at the same time it had to be homely. We wanted memorabilia, but not a museum."
 
After some soul searching, they decided to leave the coal soot on the walls. "People always said we should get it sandblasted," says Anna, "but we thought, No! No! No! It's all part of the history."
 
Anna's connection with stationmasters continued. "The sitting room floor still bore the marks of his hobnail boots," she says, "and grooves where his chair was pushed around." Many of the original features had been removed, but they managed to restore them with the judicious use of eBay. Mark managed to get hold of several original signs, as well as an old platform weigh scale.
 
The walls were perhaps the most evocative feature. In addition to the soot, many still had graffiti dating back to Victorian times.
 
"We had a plasterer in to help with the ceilings," says Anna, "and it turned out that his father had been the station's last porter. He found a bit of wall where his father had written the name of his mother, when she was just his girlfriend, alongside a heart with an arrow through it."
 
For 17 years, Long Melford Station was the centre of Anna and Mark's family life. In the summer, children would play football on the lawn and swim in the pool. In the evenings, they would have barbecues between the platforms. "We found a vinyl record from the Fifties which had an audio recording of the station," says Mark. "You could hear the trains puffing past, people talking and walking about. We'd play it outside when we had our barbecues."
 
It was a sociable place to live, every so often somebody would knock on the door to share memories of the station.
 
Now, however, the couple has reached the end of the line. Long Melford Station is currently on the market for £495,000 davidBurr.co.uk (More photos!). It includes a three-bedroom station house, annexed office space on Platform Two, a garden, and a swimming pool.
 
"Of course there will be some broken-hearted sobbing as we go down the road for the last time," says Anna. "But we're the sort of people who like to look forward to something new."
 
Mark has a passion for Neolithic archaeology, and the couple are planning to move to Orkney where "if you scratch the ground, it bleeds archaeology". Their children are sad about the move, their granddaughter is particularly upset, but they are excited about visiting them. "We have 17 years of memories tied up with the old station," says Anna, "but the time has come to move on." All change.
 

 

Taiwan and Japan Team Up for
Steam Train Tourism

Japanese steam locomotive C11 number 171 in operation - Date/Photographer unknown.
 

Hokkaido Japan and Taichung Taiwan - Railway administrations in Taiwan and Hokkaido, Japan, are set to sign a letter of intent in March to promote tourism with old steam locomotives, Taiwan Railways Administration Director-General Frank Chih-ku Fan told local newspapers 5 Feb 2012.
 
Thanks to an initiative promoted by train buffs from both countries, the tourism exchange will see old locomotives operating in summer in Taiwan and in winter in Japan.
 
Hokkaido operates its C11 locomotive every winter, attracting tourists and railway enthusiasts to see the train whistling through the snowy wetlands on the northernmost of the main Japanese islands.
 
For its part, the TRA since 2010 sought to boost train tourism by bringing the 70-year-old locomotive CK124 back to the tracks every summer on the old mountain line between Miaoli County's Sanyi Township and Houli District in greater Taichung City.
 
Fan said Japan's locomotive revival project combining transportation with tourism has inspired the TRA in its local efforts, and he hopes the cooperative exchange will help boost tourism for both countries.
 
The Hokkaido C11 will make a special run 20 Mar 2012, far past its usual closing date at the end of February, to welcome officials and tourists from Taiwan, while the TRA is planning special activities for 9 Jun 2012, National Railroad Day.
 
June Tsai.