History
Direct trains to Liverpool via Ormskirk were withdrawn from Rufford station in October 1969, though Liverpool trains continued to run through until May of the following year. From July 1970, Rufford became the only passing point on the truncated Preston-Ormskirk branchline. Over that same summer, the station was rebuilt, with its wooden platforms and substantial station building demolished and replaced with more functional and basic facilities.
Until the late 1980s, peak-hour trains on the Preston-Ormskirk line continued to cross at Rufford station, but the service was further reduced, leaving the branchline to be operated by a single DMU running essentially along a long siding. Rufford's Victorian signalbox was demolished in October 1988 and replaced with a portakabin like structure on the site of the former station building. Over the past twenty five years, changes in the station's layout and traction have been minimal. The portakabin signal box is due to close, along with that at Midge Hall, in 2017.
Read more about this topic: Rufford Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)