Never formally closed?

2 May 2024

We love a good heritage railway.

Colleagues at Railway Paths have been volunteers and trustees at heritage railways. We’ve transferred our land to heritage railways, and we have more we’d like to give. Some of the land we have not yet leased as cycle paths still has track on it. We’re sometimes asked to sell or give the rails to heritage railways. Yes, yours for a £1 if you get the right permissions for safe removal.

Miles of our track has been lifted so we were surprised when it was suggested that for one of our sections of land, ‘The line has never been formally closed.’

What’s the proper process for closing a railway? Apart from the absence of trains for decades and the fact that British Railways was happy to sell it, how do we know it is closed?

We asked the DfT for their opinion. Their reply considered passenger and freight services.

Passenger Services

There is a statutory process for withdrawal of passenger services. It has changed several times so one needs to identify the act of parliament that applied at the time. The Secretary of State for Transport has to give consent for passenger services to be withdrawn. Such a consent is a matter of public record, so that’s not hard to prove.

Freight Services

After passenger services had been withdrawn lines sometimes continued to be used for freight. The DfT is clear on the cessation of freight services, here’s their succinct reply: ‘Unlike withdrawal of passenger services, this termination of line availability for freight services did not require a formal public process but was an internal BRB [British Railways Board] decision.’

Closure

When passenger services had been withdrawn by ministerial consent and British Railways had terminated the line availability for freight, the DfT says, ‘the railway was no longer operational and the track could be lifted’.

Ah yes, but if the track is still there, how do we really know?

When Network Rail was formed, there were demarcation agreements for the sections of closed railway that had track connected to the operational railway. These agreements specify where the boundary lies between the operational railway on land owned by Network Rail and the closed railway on land retained by the British Railways Board.

In conclusion, you won’t find a certificate or a DfT announcement that says a railway was formally closed. You need to look for a sequence of events: passenger service withdrawal; termination of line availability for freight; and a demarcation agreement for the boundary with the operational railway.

Public domain photograph by Adrian Pingstone via Wikimedia Commons