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　In the silent ticket office, beneath the half-moon windows of the booths, a large green sign announces “OKEHAMPTON” to an empty room. On the platform, a faded poster reads "DEVON-Travel by rail". Those reading it have had little chance to do so. The last passenger train left Okehampton on June 3rd 1972. The town turned out to mourn: the mayor stood by, holding a wreath. On the line, between the sleepers, the grass started to grow.
　But Okehampton is changing. New steel tracks gleam beneath the platform; diggers toil in the car park. The station is being reopened as part of the government's "Restoring Your Railway" fund, launched in January last year to keep a manifesto promise. Okchampton is the first to reopen.Eleven miles of track have been laid in four weeks.
　In 1963 a report by Richard Beeching. chairman of the British Railways Board, earmarked 5,000 miles of track and 2,363 stations for closure. To this day, it is seen less as a piece of bureaucracy than as an act of “infamy"; it cuts "a wound that hasn't healed", according to Stewart Francis, a former chairman of the Rail Passengers’ Council. On the Beeching "wound”, Okehampton's 11 miles of shiny new track are a mere sticking plaster.
　But to see this in terms of pure numbers is to miss the point. More than sleepers and steel were lost. "Railways have a strange position in the British mind,” says John Preston. a professor of rail transport at the University of Southampton. “A lot of rural lines disappeared that were representative of a way of life...for which there was a lot of nostalgia," he notes. The new line is less about travelling through Devon than about travelling through time.
　While lots of infrastructure is prosaic, in Britain trains become poctry, their lines not just crossing the land, but running on into the litcrature of Robent Louis Stevenso, John Betjeman and W.H.Auden. Restoring railways nods to this fictional Britain, a place of branch lines and straight backs, railway porters and station masters.
　But poetry, while nice, has never been particularly profitable. There could hardly be a worse time for them to open: in the first COViD-19 lockdown passenger numbers fell by around 90% and "the post-COVID demand path is not yet clear", says Mr. Preston. Stil, in Okchampton the locals seem pleased. Becky Tipper, the Network Rail manager in charge of the rcopening, was surprised when, as her workers started laying the track, “a crowd of people" turned out once again. This time, no wreaths. Instead, says Ms. Tipper, they started clapping.