Posted by Peter Ceresole on December 17, 2012 at 09:50:24 user PeterC.
I was just looking on the BBC iPlayer at a 'Timeshift' programme, called Between the Lines - Railways in Fiction and Film- Novelist Andrew Martin presents a documentary examining how the train came to shape the work of writers and film-makers, from Wordsworth and Dickens to The Railway Children. In it, Martin is talking about a railway poem, Adlestrop, about an unscheduled stop in a country railway station, and it's illustrated with present day film of a steam train pulling into a hilly country station, along a platform with a long, tall brick wall HANG ON A MINUTE! I know this! It's PP and 'Letting fly'! It's Oxenholme!
And so it was- you can see the name for a few seconds as the train pulls across the shot... I've never been there, but I knew it instantly, before the name came up and confirmed it. And the associations poured in...
I hadn't realised until that moment the extent to which, over the years, AR's scenes and illustrations had cemented themselves into my consciousness.
For those in the UK, the programme looks as though it will be on the iPlayer for a while as part of the 'Timeshift' series. The whole programme is nicely worth watching, has good '39 Steps', 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'Miss Marple' excerpts, and of course 'The Railway Children' with the divine Jenny Agutter. Oxenholme is at 37 minutes in.