Here is a piece of very recent local history indeed, brought to you from that part of the national railway network now called the Cotswold Line, which runs the 86 miles between Oxford and Hereford.

On two days in two successive weeks last month the small commuter two-carriage train leaving Shipton-under-Wychwood for Oxford at 7.39am has been cancelled.

OWW. And that is not an expletive or a howl of anguish from me or any other would-be commuter living near enough the line to catch the train across the idyllically beautiful countryside of a morning, but merely the name originally given to the line when it was opened, back in 1851.

Look at any of the original bridges along the line, crossing and recrossing the Evenlode as it meanders along its valley, and you will see those letters stamped on to the masonry. Officially they stand for the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Line — which, quite early in life, became known as the Old Worse and Worse — a name it has been living up to ever since.

Back in the early 1970s, when I lived in Combe, the line suddenly underwent a giant step for the worse, when someone in British Railways (as the nationalised service was then called) decided to pull up half the railway lines between Wolvercote and Ascott-under-Wychwood, leaving behind only a single track — which meant, of course, that no two trains could pass each other on that part of the line. I remember that happening particularly well, because much of the shelter at Combe Halt on the old westbound track, which was made of railway sleepers, burned a treat in my fireplace!

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was commissioned to design the line following an Act of Parliament in 1845, but problems and delays immediately beset the project to such an extent that (perhaps fortuitously) the broad gauge (seven foot and a a quarter inch) that Brunel favoured and which the Act required, had to be abandoned in favour of the standard gauge of four feet eight-and-a-half inches.

After leaving Oxford station, the Cotswold Line immediately crosses the Sheepwash Channel which links the Oxford Canal to the River Thames. Here attentive passengers may catch a glimpse of the now dilapidated old swing bridge over the channel which used to carry the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) line to its Rewley Road station (which has now been dismantled and re-erected as the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre at Quainton, near Aylesbury.) First stop is Hanborough station. The huge doors of its now long-vanished waiting room and ticket office were opened only twice in the 20th century. Once when the Kaiser came to visit Blenheim in Edwardian times, and again in 1965 when Sir Winston's Churchill’s funeral train arrived here. (Sir Winston, of course, is buried in Bladon churchyard.) After the next stop, Combe (where the line cuts right through a hill) the scenery to my mind becomes ever more beautiful – and poignant too. The station at Adlestrop no longer exists, but who can cross the county line into Gloucestershire without thinking of Edward Thomas’s poem, written shortly before his death in 1917.

The poor Old Worse and Worse. More trains run along it now than ever before and its reliability has suffered. But this summer Network Rail is to re-lay the double track from Ascot-under-Wychwood to a point just east of Charlbury (ripped up in 1971), so here is hoping the OWW will soon become the New Better and Better.