JOURNEY'S END?

The sun was low in a serene sky behind the young man with the golden dog. Straddling in the corner of a field, he swiftly aimed his camera up the high railway embankment and snapped the passing train.

Someone might have done that at any time since about the turn of the century, though the old Great Eastern trains were different from the modern diesel and cameras have changed too.

None of the passengers took any notice. They were used to it by now. They had been ambushed by photographers all the way and it would be the same coming back. But for one more journey after dark ours was the last train on the Stour Valley line between Sudbury and Cambridge. After last Saturday night the tracks would be silent and empty, due soon to be ripped up.

The old-fashioned stations, on which weeds had already began their silent advance, took it variously. Cavendish sported a few drooping lines of grubby bunting. Haverhill insisted that this was not a festive occasion but a funeral. "THIS STATION", someone had chalked below its name, "DIED OF STARVATION".

Was the closure really necessary? There are, as always, two sides to the argument. One could not suspect the railway staff of apologetics, since 25 of them are now redundant. But the conductor had "been on some nights and only taken seven bob" all the way from Colchester to Cambridge - "Can't run trains like that".

Yet there was a silent reproach in the ticket collector's cap that someone was taking home as a souvenir. Even the rising new houses that look down on Haverhill Station seemed to signal the coming of many thousands of new residents and to cry out "Why now, of all times"?

When something the public is used to having is taken away there are always loud protests. The Stour Valley line has been fortunate to have knowledgeable champions as well. Mr Charles Douglas Brown, for one, worked out a plan for more economical operation of the route which was actually passed by the Movements Department of British Railways. Whereupon British Railways seem to have doubled the figure they first thought of, so that even Haverhill and other councils ready to stand the loss had to back down.

Mr D. F. Taylor, sometime assistant editor of the the Railway ABC, and quite as full of figures, went one better than Mr Douglas Brown, who had scaled down the estimated deficit to almost nothing, not counting the bus subsidy. Mr Taylor claims from British Railways' own figures that the line did and could make a substantial profit, though why in that case they should want to close it is not altogether clear.

Somehow neither the Prime Minister (busy, no doubt trying to keep his own party from going clean off the rails) nor the Minister of Transport got around to answering Mr Taylor's arithmetic paper before Saturday's closure.

We appeal to the Minister of Transport at least to listen to Mr Keith Stainton M. P., and others who seem to feel that British Railways has pulled a fast one. Will Mrs Castle insist on a temporary standstill? No track should be removed, no station or other railway property sold, until the Ministry has been into the disputed figures.

The result should be considered along with estimates of the transport requirements of the rapidly expanding population in this area over, say, the next 15 or 20 years. There must be a ruling, by someone more disinterested than British Railways, as to whether it might not be better to reopen the line, even at a modest loss, than to destroy what cannot be put back if the land is sold.

As to the alternative bus service (which does not run between Sudbury and Haverhill on Sundays) one glance at the wide open spaces in its timetable makes one wonder how long it will be before that too disappears. The best that can be said is that this is a quite inadequate stop-gap.

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