End of Winter Musings: Virginia

In a doctor's waiting room at the end of last year I found a copy of an American railway magazine and an article about railway lines in Virginia.  The article was illustrated with some good photographs which placed the railway in a broader landscape, so that the train was a tiny element in the huge wooded valleys.    The article was about the lines in winter and especially at night, so on the pictures the trains sent a small weak beam of light into a vast impenetrable snowy American night; the writer spoke of abandoned branch lines and ghost towns abandoned when the coal ran out; of towns abandoned by the railway which runs through them but never stops; of great loops of railway running up into the hills to derelict mining towns.  And all under a deep blanket of midwinter snow.  The writer conjured a time of winter darkness, cold, empty forests, closed towns, a weak train light getting stronger, the mournful blast of an air horn...

There is a magic and a poetry in lost railway lines; we have a railway spur here which has been closed since the 1960s; a summer walk, I think.