He has not been heard of since.’ So wrote Punch in the early 1860s, lampooning the awful train services of the Eastern Counties Railway, the company that in mid-Victorian times ran most of the trains to East Anglia. The novelist William Makepiece Thackeray commented at the same time in a similar sardonic vein, ‘Even a journey on the Eastern Counties Railway comes to an end.’ But perhaps we should be grateful for East Anglia’s remoteness and relative inaccessibility. It still has dreamy branch lines and slow secondary railways of the sort that disappeared from much of the rest of the network long ago. True, some of the quieter branches have gone. It’s no longer possible to change at country junctions onto little two-coach trains pulled by antiquated engines for stations with lovely East Anglian names such as Lavenham, Brightlingsea, Aldeburgh, Southwold or Snape. No longer do trains loaded with holidaying mill workers from the West Midlands halt at Melton Constable and all stations beyond on their way to the holiday camps and camp sites of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts.
