A TINY railway station in west Oxfordshire, which is served by just two trains a day and has survived several closure threats, has reached its 75th birthday.

More than 100 Combe residents and members of the small band of regular passengers celebrated the occasion yesterday with a glass of Champagne and a birthday cake.

Local folk musicians also played on the platform as the 5.31pm train from Oxford rolled in.

The guest of honour was author Dorothy Calcutt, 90, who remembers catching the train into Oxford from Combe on the day the station opened in 1935.

As part of the day’s celebrations, a First Great Western express train made a special stop in the morning to pick up children from Combe Primary School for a day trip to Worcester, with an afternoon train also making an extra stop to bring them home.

The events, which harked back to similar celebrations for the station’s 50th anniversary, were organised by Combe Parish Council, train operator FGW’s local managers and the Cotswold Line Promotion Group.

Parish councillor Elena Softley said: “The station has been under threat several times and we’re so pleased that it has stayed open.

“There are about half a dozen people who take it every day, as it’s our only train link.”

She added: “I think it’s important not to cut back on trains, as they’re going to become more important in the future.”

A commemorative ticket, similar to those used by the Great Western Railway in 1935, when the halt opened, was made to mark the event.

The timber platform, perched on an embankment carrying the line across the Evenlode valley, sees scarcely more than 2,000 journeys a year starting or finishing there.

Like its near-neighbour at Finstock, Combe Halt was opened in the mid-1930s as the Great Western Railway tried to fight growing competition from bus services.

That the station is still open is largely down to a flawed closure notice and a change in the law in 1994.

British Rail applied to close Combe and Finstock on the grounds that so few people used them, it would not be cost-effective to modernise the platforms to meet new safety standards.

However, the Health & Safety Executive was not notified of this opinion and the closure notice was ruled out of order as a result.

By this time, the 1993 Railways Act, paving the way for privatisation, had become law, repealing the station closure procedures used since the 1960s, and British Rail did not bother restarting the process under the new law.