The Puzzle of Poison Cross

Poison Cross was one of the stations on the East Kent Light Railway, and is typical in a way of why the line was to be so little used. It had no station buildings, there was no inn or public house nearby, no porter, no signal box, not even a station master. If you had turned up there expecting to be able to buy a ticket, you would have stood on the empty platform with nobody to answer your questions. Behind the platform fence would have been a collection of greenhouses and the brick chimneys for the fires which kept them warm in winter, and over beyond a pair of roads was a farm. The only remarkable thing you would have seen was a box secured to the wooden fence of the platform, labelled "Poison Sandwich". It had a padlock keeping the lid securely closed against any compulsion to try a bite, as Alice might have done had she arrived there in pursuit of the rabbit, but several visitors to the station recorded the interesting fact that, while the lid to the box was padlocked, the box itself was not screwed down to the base, and so the lid and sides could be lifted off, revealing the fact that the box was for the staff which controlled the section of the line between Poison Cross and Sandwich Road.

The very name itself had attracted me to the railway when I first picked up the book by Mitchell and Smith in the Ian Allen bookshop in Birmingham, to read about a single-line railway in North Kent that started nowhere, ended up nowhere, and and in between those nowheres, wandered around between interesting names like Golgotha, Gore, and Poison Cross. My curiousity had got the better of me, and I found myself buying other books which were about, or had sections on the East Kent Light Railway, and, eight years after I had first read of it, I was now in North Kent, on a bicycle, looking for what was left of the line.

This is all that I could find as evidence that there had ever been a railway at Poison Cross when I paid a visit to the site in September 2006. I had arrived at the site of one of two level crossings where the railway track crossed one road, split into a pair of lines to form a loop, then crossed another road before reaching a tiny platform and a siding. The map might explain better than I can what the site was supposed to look like.

The puzzle I faced was that I, standing facing south with my camera, was looking at where a single line of rails had approached down the slope from Eastry, and yet I saw in front of me two sets of railway formations, it would seem. Had the roads been moved since the line had been closed? It didn't look like it. Were the books wrong? I could accept that as a possibility. I had already discovered a couple of errors in the two-volume book which I regarded very much as the bible of the line. But who was there to turn to who could resolve this problem? The line had been closed for nearly sixty years. Some of the people I was meeting didn't even know that there had ever been a railway there. And, to fuel my suspicions that there might indeed have been two lines crossing the first road, at several other places along the line, the engineer had arranged for sidings to begin in such a manner as to cross the road alongside the main track, for the purpose of securing a right of way for twin-tracks. It was his ambition to eventually have double-track throughout the system, and he didn't want to have to go through the tortuous procedure for getting permission to cross public roads all over again.

I finally solved the puzzle when I sat going through the photographs, and looking at the twin mounds of earth which I had taken to be the trackbeds, realised that they were not higher than the surrounding land, but only higher than the piece of land between them. The line had actually been in a very slight cutting there, barely two feet deep. The road, and the tarmaced surface where the points had been, had subsequently been smoothed and levelled, and only the farm garden had been left untouched to preserve the remnant of the East Kent Light Railway which I had photographed.

It is a rather mundane end to the puzzle, I know, and it is much more interesting to speculate if there had ever been a poison-sandwich competition while the station was still open.