Long lost Cambridgeshire railway station that closed after just five …

While Cambridgeshire is set to get more railway stations over the coming years, it still has far fewer than it used to. Work continues apace on Cambridge South and elsewhere in the county Cambourne and Tempsford are set to get new stations as part of the East West Rail development.

Even with these new stations opening up, Cambs still has fewer stations than it did a century. Many of the lost stations fell victim to the infamous Beeching Cuts of the 1960s, which saw many towns and villages up and down Britain lose their train service as part of sweeping changes to the network.

Before they were axed however, some of those lost railway stations had served passengers in their communities for decades, some for more than a century. But not all of them.

Prickwillow is a village of around 400 people in East Cambridgeshire^[2]. The tiny settlement is unlikely to be considered for a new railway station at any point in the near future.

However, this was not the case in 1845, as the first train networks spread their tracks across the country. This tiny village, which presumably was even smaller almost two centuries ago, got its very own railway station.

The first passenger trains to and from the village first started running on 30 July, 1845. The station sat between Ely^[3] and Shippea Hill and was served by the now defunct Great Eastern Railway, which served the London to Norwich line and other services throughout East Anglia.

Both Ely and Shippea Hill both have stations to this day and the Great Eastern Railway itself would operate until 1922. However, Prickwillow was not to be so long-lived.

The station is reported to have stopped seeing passenger services in October 1850. Just over five years after the first train left the station.

References

1. ^{^} Cambs railway station lay disused for more than 50 years before reopening (www.cambridge-news.co.uk)
2. ^{^} Cambridgeshire (www.cambridge-news.co.uk)
3. ^{^} Ely (www.cambridge-news.co.uk)