Newton Abbot on a Sunday morning, a tidy, trading town. Streets lined with independent shops offering every good and service one might imagine. Pulling into a town centre car park, it was the railway station that had a magnetic power. Newton Abbot station had been a place for coming and going in teenage years. The school minibus would drop a clutch of homeward bound boys, each with a warrant for a second-class half-fare single ticket. The single ticket to Taunton was sixty-five pence.

There was a pattern, but no apparent …