Freight trains travel nightly along tracks that run past Southcote and Northwich Park stations, and across the above bridge (near Trentford, just outsidevof Harlowe) - northerly toward Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, and in a southerly direction toward the ports of Felixstowe, Tilbury and Southampton. Yet much of the solitary journeying of these locomotives occurs well outside the domesticated hubs of industrialised modernity: over fenlands, across barren moors, through tunnels bored deep into domed hills, and aside ancient meres and those deeply forested areas that even today cover over a tenth of the British landscape (of which less than a tenth is currently urbanised and populated).
Who knows what unexpected travellers may have boarded at some remote spot at 3am, when a train had come to a grinding halt as the service was being regulated? And who knows what might have alighted to take shelter in the cool darkness beneath one of Horsingdon's many railway arches?
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