Brief re-encounter The clock stopped at Carnforth station, long ago. But time -as it always must -moved on. Walls crumbled, doors warped, broken windows were bricked up. And the backdrop to Britain's most wept-over movie, Brief Encounter, was left to decay like some lost romantic dream. The express trains that whistled up the West Coast thundered without stopping past the platform where love had once waited. The few passengers who did pause between bites of microwaved butties to look for the buffet where Bath buns had been served, to seek the sad ghosts of two lovers amid exhaled clouds of steam, found that progress had shunted romance into a siding. Disgruntled commuters huddled where Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard once parted. As The Times reports today, the Carnforth drama is, at long last, to be given a happy ending. Thanks to funds raised by a trust and a contribution from Railtrack, the setting of David Lean's classic is to be saved from the demolition ball. More than a structure is being restored; a station -any station -amounts to more than the sum of its parts. A platform for partings and meetings, it stages emotional journeys. Any child who has sat hunched on a boarding-school trunk, any lover who has clasped a beloved's hand through a window, any wife who has opened her arms in welcome knows that. Railway platforms capture feelings that are intense precisely because they are focused upon a point of transition. From Dickens to Tolstoy, Turner to Monet, writers and painters have made the most of the platform. Even at its most modern or mundane, the station can be imbued with pain or joy. For most people, somewhere, there exists a narrow strip of concrete that stands forever outside ordinary experience. That is why so many will welcome the return of wartime romance to Carnforth station. Emotional history is recaptured. Time is to be regained on this sooty asphalt. It is enough to bring a speck of dust to the eye. Brief re-encounter The Times - 13 August 2001
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