THE Blenheim & Woodstock branch line was the first of Oxfordshire’s major railways to succumb to closure, seeing its last trains in 1954, seven years before Dr Beeching began to sharpen his axe.

I bought these two photographs of the route at a recent collectors’ fair.

One shows the station frontage in Oxford Street, Woodstock – still with us today as part of Young’s Garage, although no longer used as a filling station shop.

The picture appears to have been taken some time between 1948 and 1954, as the posters are headed with British Railways ‘totem’ symbols, but the image is undated.

Perhaps some of our eagle-eyed motorcycle enthusiasts may know what the models parked outside the entrance are and when they were made, to help me pin down the date.

The other picture shows an ex-Great Western Railway auto-train at Shipton-on-Cherwell halt, which opened in 1929 and was the only intermediate stop on the line after it left the Oxford-Banbury main line at Kidlington.

The locomotive is GWR 14XX class No 1420 and I believe the photograph was taken on or very near the day that the line closed, Saturday, February 27, 1954, as other pictures taken on the final day show the same locomotive working the line with the chalked face on the smokebox door.

No 1420, which entered service in November 1933, fared rather better than the Oxfordshire branch lines she worked on for much of the 1950s, including the rare distinction for a small tank locomotive of powering the Royal Train when The Queen visited Abingdon in 1956.

Withdrawn by BR in 1964, she was sold for preservation on the Dart Valley Railway at Buckfastleigh in Devon and remains there today, now under the ownership of the South Devon Railway, and is undergoing an overhaul to extend her working life.

See the web links for more details of No 1420 and for pictures taken along the branch line's route in 2008.