I took a train from one end of the line to the other, and it only cost me £1.60. And even though it took just three minutes to cover less than a mile, that still felt like a bargain. Because, although I’ve been riding the shuttle train between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town all my life, only now have I realised how special it is, being the shortest railway line in Britain.
I whiled away the three-minute journey reading deeply into the subject. There were a couple of operators on board, which seemed a bit excessive under the circumstances, so I took the opportunity to bombard them with questions. I felt bad about asking this, but I wondered whether, when they were growing up wanting to be train drivers, this was quite what they had in mind. “Well, the thing is,” said one of them, “I never really wanted to be a train driver in the first place.” I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Otherwise they conveyed nothing but pride in their work, shuttling hundreds of thousands of passengers in and out of the town every year. They told me that as well as being the shortest line, it was also pretty steep, what with its 1-in-67 gradient. And, they said, they go back and forth no fewer than 214 times a day. “It is a bit repetitive,” one of them conceded.
Later I read that the Germans are now laying claim to having the shortest railway line in all of Europe. It clocks in at barely half a mile and runs from Friedrichshafen Stadt to Friedrichshafen Hafen, and by the time you’ve said all that out loud the journey must be almost over.
Fair play, but I award my home town a moral victory here. Because as far as I can see, the train between Friedrichshafen Stadt and Friedrichshafen Hafen only makes about 70 journeys a day. Small potatoes! Or kleine Kartoffeln, as they probably don’t say in Germany. Stourbridge’s 200-plus daily runs plainly knock Friedrichshafen’s efforts into a cocked hat.
• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
