ABSTRACT
Railways transformed the economy and society of England in so many ways that it is easy to forget how much they left unaltered or the part they played in awakening a sense of the past. Yet wherever they went they passed through an ancient land, deeply embedded in local custom, rich in the evidence of historic buildings and rural tradition, the creation of generations of country people.1 Sometimes they obliterated the remains of a medieval castle, as at Northampton; sometimes they cut through the centre of historic villages, as at Weston on Trent; sometimes they strode across market towns on mighty viaducts, as at Mansfield, heedless apparently of historic considerations. In the sixth chapter of The Victorian Railway (1991) Jack Simmons has forcefully reminded us of the ‘vandalism’ of their early years. Eventually, indeed, they were destined to undermine much of the fabric of rural tradition itself through industrial and suburban expansion and other, more insidious, developments.
