Golf Club Halt


In 1933, a new "Hail & Ride" Halt was built for the newly built Brighton & Hove Golf Club. This platform stands roughly 3/4 of a mile from Dyke Station. In a peculiar concession to the golfing fraternity (and as far as I can find, a unique one!) when the signal at Dyke Station dropped and the train pulled away from the Dyke Station Platform, a bell would sound in the Golf Club house, allowing golfers to hurriedly quaff their drinks and saunter down to the platform for the train back to Brighton! There was little chance of their ever missing the train.

In much the same way as the Dyke Terminus platform appears to be in very good condition, the Golf Club Halt appears to be also, but being hidden from view in the middle of a pretty hostile thicket of hedges and saplings, it is not instantly visible to people walking nearby. We have it on good authority that the Halt is on private land and that the farmer who owns the land is known for his hostility, however, your intrepid crew just pleaded ignorance.

It is a miracle we didn't get run off the site with shotguns, as Geoff's jacket was bright orange and clearly visible from another galaxy...!

 


ABOVE: The is the club house for Brighton and Hove Golf Club. The building has not really changed at all since the time of the the Railway's closure. The rough path at the bottom left of the photo denotes where the track bed of the railway was. A little walk along this path would bring golfers to the platform, which was a little difficult to find as it was in the middle of a large area of scrub. The process of elimination in order to find it relied on us guessing that the largest are of scrub visible would be the one with the platform hidden in it! Thankfully we were right and found the platform almost in the pit of a small valley, surrounded as it was by scrub and small saplings.


ABOVE: This is the view looking back along the path of the trackbed, as described in the text for the photo above this one. The platform is in the bushes in the top left corner of the photo, directly above the brown patch of dried grass on the crest of the bank.

ABOVE & BELOW: The brick built platform is in remarkable condition seeing as it has been left to face the ravages of it's (fairly bleak) environment for 80 years or more. The whole of the platform is not visible in it's entirety and so the photos are various shots of about 4 different locations where the platform was clearly visible and fairly accessible.  

BELOW: This is a panoramic shot of the largest visible section of the Golf Club Halt platform, which is (at a conservative estimate) roughly a fifth of the total length. Again, the platform here is in remarkable condition. There is a conservation group that occasionally clear the site in order to make it more accessible, which brings up the question of unwanted trespassers on the farmer's land: would they take the trouble to conserve the site if it wasn't intended to be accessible?  It is interesting to note that the distance from the lip of the platform to the ground is pretty much how it would have been when the track was still there.


  
  
  

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