The railway children

ONE OF THE DELIGHTS of the festive season was a television screening of The Railway Children, an adaptation of the famous book by Edith Nesbit, written in 1905.

This film, which stars Jenny Agutter, is a marvellous evocation of Edwardian childhood and will be remembered particularly by children who were resident at the Bourne House hostel in West Street who saw the film when it was shown at the town’s Tudor Cinema soon after release in 1970.

The Tudor Cinema in North Street opened in 1929 and was a popular attraction for the next 40 years but the impact of television soon caused a decline in attendances and so it was then being used for bingo on three nights a week and this was one of the last films to be screened there before they were phased out completely two years later.

Regular matinee performances were held at the cinema, usually on Saturday afternoons when youngsters from Bourne House were among the audience. The hostel, funded by the local authorities, had opened in 1955 to provide a home for maladjusted children, orphans or those from broken homes, and continued in this role until 1985 by which time almost 250 boys and girls had been cared for.

Going to the pictures was a weekly treat for them and there was great excitement when this film was screened in Bourne and the cinema was packed with children from the town. The moment the paper chase scene involving boys from the local grammar school came on the screen, youngsters in the cinema thought they recognised the location, the disused railway tunnel at Toft, three miles to the west of Bourne, and the memory, although mistaken, remains with them to this day.

The railway through Bourne had closed down in 1959 and the disused line on the Stamford Road was a favourite haunt for adventurous children from the hostel, especially the long, dark and empty tunnel where they would often play, hiding in the dead men alcoves once used by railwaymen whenever a train passed through. But the idea that this was used in the film has since been dismissed as a piece of local folklore for although there is a close resemblance between the two locations, director Lionel Jeffries actually used the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in Yorkshire and its station at Oakworth as the backdrop, referring to it as the Great Northern and Southern Railway.

At the time of shooting, there were very few heritage railways in Britain and only the five-mile long KWVR could offer a tunnel which is important to a number of scenes although in reality it is a lot shorter than it appears in the film. Toft tunnel, however, is 330 yards long and was built during the late 19th century when it became one of the great civil engineering feats on the rail link between the Midlands and East Anglia.

After the line closed, the land on both sides of the tunnel was subsequently bought by Bourne Urban District Council. A section on the eastern side was used for rubbish dumping for a while and when the authority was superseded by South Kesteven District Council in 1974 it was planned to extend refuse disposal throughout the site but the proposal was shelved. Later, during the Cold War period of 1979-85 when there was a presumed threat of a nuclear attack, Lincolnshire County Council investigated the possibility of using the tunnel as a public shelter equipped with beds, food stores and other survival equipment but it was deemed not to be feasible and the idea was dropped.

Then in 1993, Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust stepped in to preserve the tunnel and surrounding area as a nature reserve open to the public. It consists of the two deep eastern and western cuttings that include a large portion of gorse, buckthorn and cowslips, a pond and wet areas of limestone grasses and also acts as a linear wildlife park. In the summer of 2003, a pyramidal orchid and a common spotted orchid were found on the site and as conditions are perfect for both species, there are hopes that the numbers will increase in future years.

The land can become very wet in winter but an all-weather raised path in the east cutting has been built for access. The mixture of scrub and open areas with rich grassland provides a diverse range of habitats. Whitethroat and willow warbler are regular nesting species, while in winter there are often large numbers of fieldfare and redwing. Twenty-one types of butterfly have also been recorded. The trust continues a programme of annual management, mainly maintaining stretches of dense hawthorn and blackthorn trees and also restoring some sections of permanent grassland.

This relic from the heyday of Victorian rail travel now provides a new delight for those in the 21st century who seek out the flora and fauna that have colonised the abandoned track which is well worth a visit at any time of the year although the tunnel itself has now been closed.

In the autumn of 2006, engineers ruled that it was unsafe and that visitors would be in danger from falling masonry. Decades of soot have taken their toll on the interior brickwork which has started to crumble and fall in some places. Metal palisade fencing has been erected across each end, thus isolating the surrounding nature reserve and the future of the tunnel is now uncertain although there are fears that the new restrictions may be the start of proceedings to demolish the structure altogether.

Nevertheless, many people now living around the world who passed through the Bourne House hostel still have fond memories of Toft tunnel and The Railway Children because experiences from our early years make such an indelible impression that they are difficult, perhaps impossible, to erase even if we wanted to. One of the girls who stayed there, now pursuing a successful law career in London, wrote to me with memories of being in the audience and even though they were mistaken about the location, she said: “Whenever I see the film, it always reminds me of those happy times in Bourne.”