Tollesbury Pier Station

This is where the line ran out of England. Tollesbury Pier Station was the very end of the branch, added in 1907 – three years after the railway reached the village – to serve grand plans for the waterfront: bungalows, a yacht station, even a continental packet port and a weekend resort on the Blackwater. The reality was far humbler. The “station” was little more than an old railway coach body and a small red-brick hut, standing about forty yards short of the pier itself, with no permanent staff. The dreams came to nothing, the extension carried passengers for barely fourteen years, and by 1921 this end of the line had already closed. Stand here and it takes some imagination to picture a terminus at all – which is rather the point of the story.