The Counter Drain station

Counter Drain railway station was a remote halt serving the village of Tongue End on the route of the Spalding and Bourne Railway which opened in 1866. In later years, it became part of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway which ran through East Anglia to the Norfolk coast.

The station opened on 1st August 1866 and closed on 2nd March 1959 when the Bourne railway service ended, although the line remained opened for goods traffic until 1964. The three intermediate stations between Spalding and Bourne had unusual names, Tongue End, Counter Drain and Pode Hole, because there were few nearby settlements, Counter Drain being the name of a drainage ditch close to the station, built during the 18th century to take flood water from the nearby fens around Bourne.

The railway line at this point crossed both the Counter Drain and the River Glen within a few yards of each other and the bridge over the river is still intact but all of the railway buildings have gone. Although one of the smallest stations in the Bourne area during the railway era it did warrant a station master and the railway even provided him with a house on the side of the main platform.

The job of station master was filled for a time by Percy Craske who was appointed in 1932. He was born into a railway family at Aylsham, Norfolk, in 1906 and began his career as a porter and by the time he moved to the stationmaster’s house at Counter Drain, he had married Gladys Cheney (born 1908) and they had begun to raise a family. Although only a small station, there were sufficient passenger and freight trains to keep him busy until he moved to Bourne as assistant station master in 1941. Despite the lack of services at this isolated railway outpost, his daughter, now Mrs Pamela Binns, remembers the years at Counter Drain where she grew up with great affection.

NOTE: Photographs courtesy Jonathan Smith

See     Memories of a railway childhood     Tongue End

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