The beauty of signal-boxes
The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future dukes in search of ideas can now thank Gordon Biddle for a new encyclopaedia. In Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings they can look up stations, tunnels, viaducts and signal-boxes all the way from Penzance — where Brunel’s original station was described as a large dog’s house of the nastiest and draughtiest kind — to the king-post roofs of Wick and Thurso. The range is prodigious.