Love story station's romantic revival
Once it was the setting for a love story that was famously brief. Now the romantic glory of a small-town railway station is being made permanent. Restoration work has begun to take Carnforth station in Lancashire back to its good old days when it formed the backdrop to the classic film Brief Encounter. Broken and bricked-up windows and crumbling walls are being replaced with a museum, tea-room and information booth. From next April a new set of costume actors will dash down the platform and embrace under the station clock to the backdrop of a waiting steam engine. Bath buns will be served in the tearoom at the centre of the love affair written by Noel Coward. Tourism officials hope that the station will soon see mainline trains stop once more on their way to the Lake District, bringing an influx of Japanese, Australian and American tourists to the town. It is the end of a long wait for locals such as Elaine Maudsley, who had a walk-on part in the 1945 film and subsequently met her husband, John, in the tea room where the film's lovestruck couple also met. "The only way we could save what is left of the buildings from being knocked down was by using the station's history to take it into the future," Mrs Maudsley, now 76 and a widow, said. "It has been a long uphill struggle with a plot line fit for a movie of its own, but it looks like we are finally there." Carnforth was chosen as a setting for the film because of its remoteness from London; it was feared that the lights from the filming could attract the Luftwaffe during the final months of the war. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson played the couple who fall in love before parting for the sake of duty. The film recently came second in the British Film Institute's list of great British films. The station's glory has not been so enduring. Its bustling refreshment rooms, bookstall and clock all fell victim to technological advances in the decades that followed. Half the platforms were torn out in the 1960s with the electrification of the West Coast Main Line. The station subsequently lost its ticket office, staff waiting rooms and lavatories. The original 1870s workings of the clock were sold for scrap and replaced by an electric mechanism that ran erratically for years before stopping. Five years ago it was voted the worst station in England and earmarked for demolition. It was only when Peter Yates, a prominent member of Carnforth Station Friends' Trust, spotted five Japanese tourists taking photographs of each other beneath the clock that he realised its connections could save it. Despite being rejected for a National Lottery grant on the ground that the station was not a listed building, the trust has spent the past five years raising the Pounds 1.2 million needed to save it. In addition Railtrack has contributed Pounds 550,000 and agreed to update the tracks. Work to repair the crumbling buildings is due to be completed in October. Although scenes from the refreshment room in Brief Encounter were filmed on a studio set, the trust intends to replicate the cast-iron stove and mahogany counter. The clock is in a workshop being repaired; its original roman numeral face and mechanism were traced to a shop in West London, and have been bought back to be reinstalled. Even if it is a while before actors are back performing on the station's platforms, with the rest of the work well under way it is already "too late to be sensible", as Trevor Howard once said. Love story station's romantic revival, The Times - 13 August 2001
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