Over the years our station became popular with nearby film and TV studios as the favoured location for train or station scenes, this being a relatively quiet backwater of the LMS and later British Railways where filming would not have had a significantly detrimental impact upon operations.
The heydey of this work was between the 1930s and 1960s. Here is the full list, as far as we know, of the films and TV productions which used the station:
- Victoria the Great (1937)
- Poison Pen (1939)
- Double Confession (1950)
- Night of the Demon (1957)
- Danger Man: The Sanctuary (1959)
- She’ll Have to Go (1962)
- Impact (1963)
- Cuckoo Patrol (1965)
- We Thought You’d Like to Be Caesar (1965)
- Department S: A Small War of Nerves (1968)
Now, thanks to long-time friend of the station Michael Korn and his friend Mark, to whom we are very grateful indeed for researching and pulling this together, you can enjoy a compilation of the relevant extracts from most of the films above by clicking on the Youtube link below. As ever, film, better than any other medium, provides a fascinating window into the feel of the station at the time. The extracts are brimming with period detail and even authentic sounds of the Abbey Flyer during its heydey, before decline and ‘rationalisation’ so decimated the infrastructure from the late 1960s onwards.