Where Was I? for 6 June 2010:
Clever, those railway engineers, the way they used contours. Could that be why this line swoops in a huge arc around this battlefield? Or was it because even they would not desecrate the site of this country’s most noted conflict? Victory (which came in less than an hour) went to a duke. I enjoy a good view of the battlefield through the carriage window - not least when my train approaches the country’s largest viaduct (579yd, 118ft high) as it traverses a river.
The line then assumes a generally southerly direction until, nine rail miles later, it reaches a second (and Britain’s last mainline all-timber) viaduct. Crossing a bog, it is a mere 30yd long. Immediately left, a lake (one mile long), before, four miles later, we pass through a hamlet where, on the northeastern edge of a mountain range, a national "industry" is well represented. The "factory" (hardly the right word) is one of the highest of its kind. Slowly, the line nudges southeast, to forge its way, with adjacent road, through a pass whose summit (some 1,320ft) is the route’s second highest.
And so, 36 minutes later, at only the second station after my journey commenced in a city to the north, I alight at a small town, developed as a leisure resort during the 1960s. One of its principal protagonists was a baron, a department-store owner (born 1903); its architect (born 1910), meanwhile, sank to criminal notoriety. Prior to that, this place was little more than a railway junction - although, in 1968, when one of its lines closed, that role ceased. Or did it? For now, across the platform, a preserved railway makes its way northeast, broadly following the line of a second river. A happy coincidence, I beam; and scuttle off to buy a ticket.
The questions
1. What is the name of the summit?
2. What is the name of the second river?