Great Western Coffee Shop

Today I walked alongside a few short stretches of the Lambourn Valley Railway in West Berkshire and, driving beforehand past Boxford, noticed that the former station shelter that had been moved to act as a bus shelter on the Newbury-Lambourn road had disappeared. I recall that just before Lockdown there had been some debate about its future as it needed much TLC, and I gather
that it's now at Didcot Railway Centre.

Back around 1962, a couple of years after closure to the public, I was cycling nearby, some 25 miles from school, when I passed a schoolmate riding in the opposite direction with a station nameboard under his arm. (I think it might have been "Boxford".) When I returned to the area in the 1970s, I visited the site of Welford Station, then the "terminus" of the remains of the line that ran from Newbury solely to deliver munitions to the USAF base that was - and is - nominally "RAF Welford". Trains would run into the station site, then move onto the spur leading up to the base. Munitions now arrive by road off the M4.

(It's some years since I "checked out" the route of the line but, IIRC, there are very few signs of the LVR - today I noticed a couple of bridges and a few fence posts.)