Supporting the campaign to save Bourne’s Bridge 234

I’VE BEEN following your articles in Heritage Railway regarding saving the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway’s Bridge 234 at Bourne in Lincolnshire.

I fully agree that we should not lose our railway heritage, and after living in Bourne from the 1960s to the 1990s, I remember from my childhood the railway still being in situ but only used for a daily freight train until total closure.

Myself and a friend as schoolboys walked the closed line from Bourne to Lound Viaduct and back, going through Toft Tunnel. The lines had only been lifted but the ballast was still down.

I remember the total destruction of Bourne station, engine shed, and water tower.

Going back to the remains of railway infrastructure surviving at Bourne, my wife and I visited in 2009 to see the exhibition featuring the closure of the line in 1959 at Baldocks Mill Heritage Centre.

While in Bourne, I visited where the station and infrastructure used to be and there was very little to be found. But with a little bit of searching at the end of the lawns of the Red Hall, I found the filled-in remains of the turntable pit, as can be seen in the photograph.

At the time I thought wouldn’t it be nice to excavate and have it as a sunken garden and put the idea to Bourne United Charities, but I never received a reply.

Perhaps times have changed now and something could be done with what’s left of our railway heritage in Bourne?

I wish good luck to the campaign to save and restore this bridge for future generations. Luckily, I can remember Bourne when it was a railway centre.

The photograph I took in 1964 at Peterborough East is the turntable that was originally at Bourne and is now at the Nene Valley Railway. Stefan Gronkowski,

Cornwall

➜ To join Bridge 234 Preservation Society free of charge, email savebridge234@ gmail.com or search for Bridge 234 Preservation Society on Facebook.

LMS Stanier ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 No. 44915 at Peterborough East in 1964. It was withdrawn on December 9, 1967, and later scrapped. STEFAN GRONKOWSKI

The remains of Bourne’s turntable pit can be discerned in the lawn at the rear of the Red Hall, the Elizabethan manor house that was co-opted by the railway as a ticket office for Bourne station and which still stands today. STEFAN GRONKOWSKI