It’s time to exorcise the ghosts of our great railway stations

Closed ticket offices, broken card machines, monstrous redevelopments, the chaotic HS2 experiment... it wasn’t always this way. Jonathan Glancey revisits the splendours of our rich train history – and explains how we can make it all special once again

The LNER C7 Class 4-4-2 steam locomotive No 727 approaches the Darlington Bank Top crossing on 1 June 1925 (Getty)

If you see something which doesn’t look right, speak to a member of staff or text the British Transport Police on 61016. See it. Say it. Sorted.”

Oh, the temptation. But where to begin?

Those cavernous and catastrophically expensive HS2 portals bored into the Chilterns and Warwickshire countryside that are currently causing the prime minister a major headache and that may or may not lead one day from London to Birmingham and ports of call north? That closed ticket office. The “out of order” ticket machine. Those locked platform lavatories. The lack of a cafe. No newsagent. No waiting room. No space to park the car. A conspicuous absence of station staff. And, where the willow-herbed goods sidings and abandoned engine shed once stood, gloating new cul-de-sacs of cheapjack housing that look plain wrong.