Even Stratton had a station.......can anyone remember the high bridge over the railway line in Ermin Street.....where the Hertz car rental place is.....next to the entry of the Howard Tenens industrial estate.
Can't remember the Stratton Station though.........any one know where the platform was in Stratton.
Leef the Stratton Halt was just down from the bridge that you describe, it consisted of a walkway down from by the bridge and a wooden platform on either side...it was called a Halt, because you could had to stick your arm out to get the train to stop. Now your express wasn't going to stop, but there were local steam locos that would, these worked between Swindon and Reading serving branch lines like the Faringdon branch and stations like Uffington and Challow.
I nice book written in the 80's about this stretch of railway, combines two separate accounts by a fella called Adrian Vaughan....Signalman's Morning and Signalman's Twilight. He was a young man serving as an apprentice signalman at the end of steam in the early 60's, and a decent writer. The signal box at Challow was his domain.
