A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter

T.S. Eliot – ‘The Waste Land’

A spring morning with an eerie stillness in the air and a sense of foreboding within me. Keep moving; reluctant to stop and linger I walk along the line. Is this a place of ghosts, or perhaps it is a haunting I carry within me. I lose my grip on where the memory resides, unsure as to whether it is in here or out there.

The Mold to Denbigh Junction Railway, opened in 1869 and closed in 1962. A branch line of a branch line; now a phantom limb of twisted metal, grasping roots and overhanging trees. A hot August Bank Holiday at Mold station in 1959. The engine reverses into place in a cloud of steam. It locks it grip on the waiting carriages and the expectant crowd, seaside-bound, jostle their way aboard. Rhydymwyn, Star Crossing, Nannerch, Caerwys, Bodfari. Defunct stations, long gone. Change at Denbigh Junction for the train to Rhyl.

Then that summer, 1960-something, the only traffic goods trains twice a day carrying limestone from the quarry at Hendre to the cement works at Padeswood. The rails twitch and shimmer in the blazing heat. A youthful shoulder against the door and the lock on the trackside hut gives way. The stench of rotting sandwiches, someone’s forgotten lunch. A dusty overall hanging on a nail. They find a metal box and drag it outside into the sun and flick open the catch. Detonators, someone says, I’ve seen them before. The railmen put them on the track to warn trains to slow down, he says. The boys fill their pockets with handfuls of the wristwatch-shaped treasures, scale the fence and run towards the footbridge over the river.

In Mold I find a railway bridge, still soot-blackened, and a cutting converted into a car park. But the station is long gone, where it stood is now home to a branch of Tesco. And just yesterday, or so it seems, a group of boys drop heavy stones, river-wet, onto the detonator capsules lined up on the concrete bridge. With each loud report they cheer and bite on air filled with acrid fumes.

                                                         this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give.

Philip Larkin – ‘The Whitsun Weddings’