Shippea Hill: in pride of second place

It’s that time of year again!  The Office of Rail and Road has released its annual statistics of passenger numbers per railway station, and as usual I have headed immediately for the lower extremities of the league table with one particular and cherished name in mind.  How had everyone’s favourite bleak fenland outpost done, Shippea Hill, with its tenuous service to an almost totally uninhabited tract of Cambridgeshire farmland?

Second to last!  With 76 passengers, and in 2,585th place, Shippea Hill is this year’s second-least-used station, after Elton and Orton in Nottinghamshire with 68.  Shippea Hill is mentioned in the press release as one of the five most-neglected stations, but it should still attract less limelight than it did ten years ago, when, with 22 recorded passengers in 2014/15 and only 12 in 2015/16, it earned the crown of Britain’s most-non-used station two years running.  Alas, or perhaps fortunately, this made it a victim of its own non-success: the hordes of people (relatively speaking) who then organised trips to the station with the express aim of trying to boost its statistics (for there could be no other reason) successfully knocked it off the top, or bottom spot, which it has been denied ever since by the likes of Stanlow and Thornton and Redcar British Steel.  This subtle competition does not escape the attention of the Office of Rail and Road, which acknowledges 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.’

Well, that’s me rumbled.  I have written elsewhere at lengths which I concede must seem extraordinary to any ordinary person about this station with its oft-changed, perennially debatable name and the vague extremity of the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border that it serves, essentially featureless but for a few million root vegetables and an assortment of Portakabins.  The ‘hill’ in question meets the relevant criteria only by virtue of not being quite below sea level, in contrast to the land around it, and in the absence of any other prominent feature or settlement whatsoever, ‘Shippea Hill’ is at least more helpful than the station’s former name of ‘Mildenhall Road’, Mildenhall itself being fourteen miles away.

Still, after all these years, the service at Shippea Hill remains comically impractical: one weekday morning train towards Norwich at 0726 on Mondays to Fridays, but when it comes to getting back again, nothing.  Only on Saturdays does the 0747 to Norwich have a corresponding return journey (arriving at Shippea Hill at 1615).  There is nothing on Sundays.  There remains no direct service to the neighbouring station of Lakenheath, which, perversely, is served only at weekends and enjoys a lavish Sunday service.

Second-to-last is, I think, the place that suits Shippea Hill the best.  For this is actually the most obscure position: almost as unused as the actual least-used station, but also far less talked about — just avoiding the glare of publicity which would be fatal to its status.  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-benefit-analysis-failing situation can be highlighted in the red pen of some Director of Finance.  But should such threats ever loom, legions (again, relatively speaking) of Shippea Hill revivalists would, I am sure, rally to the cause.  Long may this unpopulated patch of Fenland revel in its almost entirely unusable service — a level of provision as bleak and inhospitable as the landscape that surrounds it — and congratulations to the 70 who made it there this year!