Shippea Hill: back in its rightful place

It’s that time of year again!  The Office of Rail and Road has released its estimated statistics of railway station usage by passenger numbers, and as usual I have headed immediately for lower extremities of the league table with one particular and cherished name in mind.  Where in the rankings is Shippea Hill, with the tenuous service it provides to a remote tract of Cambridgeshire fenland?

Second to last!  With 76 passengers, and in 2,585th place, Shippea Hill is the second-least-used station after Elton and Orton in Nottinghamshire with its 68.  The press release does mention the five least-used stations, but for Shippea Hill there will be no media hype this year as there was in 2014/15 and 2015/16, when with 22 and 12 recorded passengers respectively, it earned the crown of Britain's least-used station — nor perhaps the campaigns which followed of people visiting the station with the express aim of trying to boost passenger numbers.  The ORR has noticed this too, acknowledging that 'in previous years, usage at some of the least used stations presented as part of these statistics has increased the following year.  We understand that highlighting the least used stations within these statistics can encourage people to visit them.'

I have written elsewhere at lengths which seem extraordinary even to me about this station with its uncertain name, a 'hill' only by virtue of not being quite below sea level, as is all the land around it, and serving a vague extremity of the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border that remains essentially featureless but for a few Portakabins and millions of root vegetables.

Still after all these years, the service at Shippea Hill remains unchanged: one weekday morning train towards Norwich at 0726 on Mondays to Fridays, and at 0747 on Saturdays answered only by a 1615 in the down direction on Saturdays.  There remains no direct service to the next station, Lakenheath, which is served only at weekends.

Second-to-last is, I think, the place that suits Shippea Hill the best.  This is actually the most obscure position: almost as unused as the actual least-used station, but also far less talked about — avoiding the glare of publicityby the skin of its teeth.  And Shippea Hill by nature shuns celebrity, resisting by its wind-bitten austerity, its sheer remoteness, and the obtuse blankness of the surrounding fenland, as many attempts on conquest as it possibly can.  Of course, penultimate place is also a dangerous position, where its cost-benrfit-analysis-failing name can be underlined in the red pen of some Director of Finance.  But should such threats ever loom, the great Shippea Hill revivalists of years ago would I am sure rally to the cause, were such a travesty ever threatened.  Long may this unpopulated patch of Fenland enjoy its  asymmetrical service, as bleak and inhospitable as the landscape that surrounds it — and congratulations to the 70 who made it there this year!