Forty years ago Pip Burley unexpectedly shared a railway compartment with Diana Rigg. It happened late one winter’s night on the line from Victoria to Brighton. The elegant young woman who boarded the train at the last moment was learning her lines for a production of ‘Brief Encounter’ in Worthing. She invited Pip Burley to help her learn her lines. The experience is still vividly present in Pip’s memory.
This is one of the items that make the parish magazine of Box Hill and Headley, Surrey worth reading. It’s a story that could only be bettered – as far as railway buffs are concerned – by finding that your compartment was being shared with O.V.S. Bulleid, the chief mechanical engineer who introduced the Merchant Navy Pacifics during the WW2 years and lived in the Box Hill neighbourhood. It happens to be an area of outstanding natural beauty.
The other Box Hill, in Wiltshire, may be better known than the Surrey one to railway buffs. It is the site of one of Brunel’s masterpieces, the Box tunnel. When this was opened it was, at 1.83 miles the longest railway tunnel in the world. The idea got about that Brunel aligned it so that the sun shone through it on his birthday. The engineering is that much more impressive when it is remembered that the tunnel could accommodate broad gauge rail tracks. In charge nowadays of the Lidbrook group of parish churches that includes Box, is Janet Anderson-MacKenzie.
One person who would have been delighted with this reminiscing is Wilbert Awdry, Emneth incumbent and creator not only of a railway lay-out in his attic but of Thomas, Gordon and James. Was it James who found himself blocked in or out of a railway tunnel? WA is sadly no longer with us to answer such questions. We may now have faster and more comfortable trains but the golden years of Gresley, Bulleid, Mallard and Kings and Castles are unlikely to be forgotten – in our parish magazines and elsewhere.
What was it that appealed to the clergy about railways? The order? The sounds? The smells? Was it being part of a great undertaking that got things done? Perhaps it was the very model of a popular enterprise in which all took part and all benefited. Perhaps it was a template of the society we should all like to be part of.
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