The Wisbech and Upwell Tramway was very evident when I first started travelling up this way to visit friends who used to restore old houses round here. My friends took me to the old goods yard between Upwell and Emneth, where a sorry coach body still stood, full of the local legend that it had once been Queen Victoria's private coach, pinched from the Wolverton line, her local station for Sandringham.
After I'd moved up this way, the lines could still be seen on the big road bends heading towards Wisbech. Two sidings and a loop with the goods sheds and waiting rooms still there in the long grass.
Suddenly, they'd gone, without my ever seeing the men taking the lines up and the buildings down, despite it being on my only route to Wisbech from where I lived.
All that is now left are these small remnants:-
Here we have the old Outwell yard goods office with its original rail-built fence. I assume it is now listed as somebody obviously cares for it and the fence.
Around the corner and up past where the line left the road and went across fields is this:-
Where the line crossed the Wisbech Canal, as was, it approached, each way, by a very obvious gradient, which would tax the little engines , especially in rain and snow.
There are very few"hills" like this in Fenland.
Apart from the very changed Yardmaster's house at Upwell Terminus, now a Health Centre, car park and old peoples' housing, there is nothing else. Certainly nothing at Wisbech, where a housing estate has covered the entire station site.
And so, this is all that remains of the Reverend W. Awdry's muse, for this is the line from whence came Toby the Tram Engine and all his chums, including the unfairly more popular Thomas, et al.
Oddly, the line may have skirted the parish of Emneth, but never saw the village, in which Awdry lived and was Rector.
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