Plumtree

It was our wedding anniversary [July 2016] and therefore a good excuse for an extravagant lunch out. My daughter, who knows more about such things than we do, provided us with a shortlist of some fine dining recommendations she had previously sampled, from which we plumped for the bistro at Plumtree. It occupies the former railway station on the long defunct Midland Railway route from Nottingham to St Pancras, the so-called direct route via Melton Mowbray and avoiding Leicester. This meant that expresses from London to the north calling at Nottingham no longer had to travel east from Trent Junction into the city, then reverse down the same section before moving on towards Sheffield.

 

Plumtree and Keyworth, as it was first called when it opened in 1880, closed to passengers the week after I was born in 1949, so it has not been a railway station now for very nearly half of its existence. Renamed as plain Plumtree in 1893, the station had platforms either side of the double track main line. Goods traffic survived until November 1965 and the through route itself closed in 1968.

The restaurant in the main station building had been tastefully refurbished just prior to our visit. We took our table on what must previously have been the up platform but which is now a light and airy conservatory extension to the main station building. The service was attentive and polite and the food turned out to be excellent, as recommended. On my way to the loo, I found a photo on the wall showing the station in full swing during the Edwardian era.

A friendly and elegant lady on the next table told us that she had been deliberating between a summer dress and something a bit heavier before leaving home, and with the sun now putting in an appearance - fairly briefly as it turned out - she suddenly felt a little over-dressed. I decide at that moment that I had made the right decision to ditch the somewhat threadbare shorts I had been wearing earlier that morning in favour of a clean pair of only slightly faded denim jeans. It was only lunch time after all.

She went on to tell us that she had been educated at a grammar school, adding that she was now giving her age away [rather than any self-awareness of her social status that she thought we ought to know about], that she was a linguist and that her husband had been a businessman in Paris. She backed all this up by addressing her partner in French that was a little louder than seemed necessary, and in an accent that sounded overly-Anglicised to me, though in the interest of continued harmony, I kept this observation to myself.

My attention wandered outside and I noticed that the former down track was still in place, though the down platform had either been totally dismantled or what remained of it had simply disappeared behind a profusion of foliage. I drew my wife’s attention to the beginning of the catenary system adjacent to the former station yard that allows electric trains to take power from overhead wires over the 13.5 mile Old Dalby test track that runs in the direction of Melton Mowbray, where access to the whole system is now gained. I can’t quite remember her reply.

New stock for the expanding London underground network has been tested here and a section of the up line, which is still in situ towards Melton, has been equipped with an electrified third rail. Those sets can be seen sometimes on the railway overbridge that crosses the A46 double carriageway Lincoln to Leicester road to the south east of Plumtree. The Class 390 Pendolinos were tested here, too, and before that British Rail’s ill-fated but nevertheless influential Advanced Passenger Train, which reached a speed of 143.6 mph during trials in 1976 on this section of track. It had travelled even faster the year before, on the ex-Great Western main line between Swindon and Reading, reaching 152.3mph on that occasion and setting a UK record in the process.

 

After our meal, we took a walk along the driveway towards the old goods shed, south of the station building on the up side of the line. It has been transformed into a first-class functions venue known [not perhaps strictly accurately] as The Carriage Shed. As we strolled along, a wedding party started to arrive and the obligatory disco music cranked up to welcome the happy couple and their guests.

I thought about our own wedding 44 years ago to the day. It had been a rather simple registry office affair, but I recalled that my dad had been very impressed by the generally merry atmosphere that had followed the more formal town hall event for the rest of the day. People used to tell us regularly what a delightful man he was. He was also a great conversationalist but he certainly did not talk about himself all the time. He was a grammar school boy, of course – won a scholarship to go there, too, actually.