Flanders and Swann - The Slow Train: an elegy to the closure of English country Railway Stations

"Slow Train" is a song by English duo Flanders and Swann, written in July 1963. It laments the closure of England's rural railway stations and lines brought about by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, and also the passing of a way of British life enjoyed and celebrated for decades.

"Slow Train" takes the form of an elegiac list song of railway stations which has been likened to a litany. Its evocation of quiet, rural stations is romanticised and uses imagery such as the presence of a station cat or milk churns on a platform to illustrate a "less hurried way of life" that is about to vanish:

No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat,
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.

The strength of "Slow Train" is considered to lie in its list of "achingly bucolic" names of rural halts (stops at passengers' request) . The nostalgically poetic tone of Flanders' lyrics has been likened to Edward Thomas's 1914 poem "Adlestrop", which wistfully evokes a fleeting scene of Adlestrop railway station in Gloucestershire.

Although most of the stations mentioned in the song were earmarked for closure under the Beeching cuts, a number of the stations were spared closure: Chester-le-Street, Formby, Ambergate and Arram all remain open, and Gorton and Openshaw also survives, now called Gorton. Some stations referred to in the song have since been re-opened, notably Chorlton-cum-Hardy which closed in January 1967, but re-opened in July 2011 as Chorlton tram stop.

Selby and Goole were not threatened by Beeching, though the line "from Selby to Goole" mentioned in the song was closed to passengers. The other line mentioned, "from St Erth to St Ives" was reprieved, and both stations remain open.

Michael Flanders' delivery of the lyrics seems to imply that Formby Four Crosses and Armley Moor Arram were station names, but in both cases he combined two consecutive names from an alphabetical list of stations. It has been suggested that he took the names of the stations from The Guardian, explaining at least some of the discrepancies between the names in the songs and the names of the stations.

We have YouTuber Alan Moores to thank for this beautiful and moving montage.

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