Back in the dark days of regular commuting I penned a plaintive little piece called Imagining the Past. I invited you, the reader, to put yourself of a commuter of an earlier era, someone travelling on the Metropolitan Railway (not Line, this is well before the creation of London Transport) who was standing at Rayners Lane station in the dark waiting for a connection. In the early days (we are talking before the First World War) the station was out amidst fields with no buildings in sight, and only a few oil lamps would have provided any comfort. Forget today's comfortable waiting rooms - our earlier self would have stood on a wooden platform exposed to the wind and the chill night air, with perhaps only the clanking of a distant cart or the hoot of an owl for company.
A year later I wrote nostalgically about the Met's operations at the extremity of its network - the line to Verney Junction and the little branch line to Brill, routes that closed in the 1930s.
Back then (2005, not pre WW1), that was as far as I could go. But in the last couple of years I have gone much further. Using a clever computer game called Transport Fever 2, I have actually created the Metropolitan Railway as it was and put up on YouTube some videos about it. Two of them feature a full journey on the Brill branch, rebuilt as it was in 1900. And having whetted my appetite for such recreations, in the last three months I have also done the Severn Valley Railway and the Alcester branch line. The latter is of special interest for it used to run between Alcester and Bearley, in Warwickshire, just a few hundred metres down the hill from where I now live.
Here is the link to one of the videos on the Met in 1910
This is the link to the Brill video
and this is the Alcester branch link. I am better at making these thumbnails than when I started.
Once in YouTube it is easy to see all the videos in my channel. Have wallow in times gone by.
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