Golden Sands Halt railway station was a private station on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in St Mary's Bay, Kent, England.
Trains ran past this location for some 21 years before the private Golden Sands Halt opened in the summer of 1948. The post-war boom in south coast holiday camp tourism had brought huge demand to the area, and the Golden Sands holiday camp (located down Dunstall Lane and backing onto the railway line) saw the potential for entertaining its guests by the simple provision of a station on the existing railway line. The camp, originally owned and built by Robert Briggs, was sold to Maddiesons in the late 1950s.
The nature of British holiday making changed greatly over the ensuing decades, but Golden Sands Holiday Camp continued to evolve, and its private railway station remained a feature, as a request stop for service trains on the mainline.
By the early 1980s use of the station had been considerably reduced, and it was largely only special train services (provided for campers) which made use of the station. Golden Sands Halt appeared to have reached the end of its life, and indeed the 'camp' side of the station became (in the late 1980s) a storage area for the private collection of vintage fire engines owned by a director of the holiday camp; however, the 1990s saw the holiday camp enter into new ownership, with a revival of use of the private station. The new owners renamed the camp, and the station followed suit, becoming Reunion Halt.
The somewhat patchy life of this station is not surprising given that: a) it is in private ownership; b) its fortunes are totally bound up with the fortunes of the holiday camp; c) St Mary's Bay Station is located just a quarter of a mile further south, and is a fully open public station for all.
Today the Reunion campsite has been closed and the site is awaiting re-development. This means that the station is effectively closed, although no public notice has been issued to that effect, and none is required either, given the private ownership of the station. All of the buildings at the campsite have been demolished including the original 1948 station. Its single platform (on the 'down' line) is very short; in 1948 it would have accommodated just two of the short-wheelbase coaches then in use; today it is barely long enough to accommodate even a single passenger coach of modern design. The short platform still survives, whose white-painted edge may still just be made out, with a concrete wall all around, and a wooden gate providing access to and from the derelict campsite, as a reminder of a former era of holiday making.
| Disused railways | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dymchurch | RHDR | St Mary's Bay | ||
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Coordinates: 51°00′57″N 0°58′47″E / 51.01583°N 0.97972°E / 51.01583; 0.97972
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Famous quotes containing the words golden sands, golden, sands, halt, railway and/or station:
“Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with
might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“I turned my head and saw the wind,
Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair,
Into a dark and lonely wood.”
—William Henry Davies (1871–1940)
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wandered alone, bareheaded, barefoot”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The day that the Black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he is within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don’t think he’ll be by himself.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“It was evident that the same foolish respect was not here claimed for mere wealth and station that is in many parts of New England; yet some of them were the “first people,” as they are called, of the various towns through which we passed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)