RAILWAY enthusiasts from the steam era will remember the Abingdon Flyer and the Rewley Road station in Oxford.

Tank engine No 1444 is pictured at Radley station, waiting to collect passengers from a main line express and take them on the branch line to Abingdon.

The other picture shows the entrance to the former Rewley Road station, which stood on the site of the Said Business School.

The photographs were sent in by Stephen Brogden, of The Garth, Yarnton – many of his family worked on the railways.

No 1444 was a regular on the Abingdon-Radley line – we pictured it hauling a freight train on the branch (Memory Lane, February 9, 2009).

Abingdon missed being on the main line because of local opposition. But by the 1850s, many townspeople realised they were missing out on the prosperity the railways were bringing.

The Abingdon Railway Company was formed to build a branch to connect with the main line at Radley.

The line earned good profits from both passengers and freight.

Frequent passenger trains, connecting at the junction station with main line services, ran to and from the town, and in between, there were numerous freight trains.

The main cargo was coal, to heat and power homes and businesses, but the line also carried large quantities of animal skins to the tannery in the town and large numbers of cattle from the livestock market.

Between the wars, the transport of cars from the MG factory became the main freight business.

After the Second World War, the fortunes of the Abingdon Flyer began to decline. Regular buses between Oxford and Abingdon took away passenger traffic, and the last train ran on September 9, 1963.

Freight trains continued to run until March 1984 but there was only sparse traffic in the final years, after the closure of the MG car works in 1980.

The track was removed a few years later and 25 years on, there are few reminders of the town’s Rail link.

For many years, Oxford supported two railway stations – the Great Western and the London & North Western.

The latter, at Rewley Road, was approached via a swing bridge which survives to this day at the north end of the present station. It allowed trains to pass over it and boats in the Sheepwash Channel to pass under it.

The station opened in 1851 and closed 100 years later, when all passenger services were switched to use the platforms at the adjacent former Great Western station.

But the Rewley Road yard remained open for freight, particularly coal.

The station buildings have been reconstructed at the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre at Quainton, near Aylesbury.