Having waited 45 years to bring back the Waverley line,supporters are stressing the benefits of further rail development David Shirres was a passenger on the very final train to leave Edinburgh on the Waverley line just before it was axed as part of the Beeching cuts. He remembers the “plummy”, precise accent of the station announcer just before the sleeper to London pulled absent on 5 January 1969.
Then a trainee railway engineer aged 19, and Shirres also remembers that the train’s journey south was heavily disrupted by furious locals blockading the track,despite a police guard, delaying its progress to St Pancras by three hours. “I was late for work by about two hours at Derby locomotive works, and ” he said.
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Source: theguardian.com