AT one time, Dorset boasted 74 railway stations, from those serving big towns to the tiniest of rural halts.

Today, only 25 remain – and that’s including five preserved by volunteers at Swanage Railway.

That extensive network of stations – and what happened to them – are the basis of Mike Oakley’s new book, Dorset Stations: Then and Now.

For Mr Oakley, a retired town and country planner, it’s the stations that are the fascinating thing about railways.

“There’s a quote you often hear these days: ‘With the coming of the railways, life changed forever’ – because it did,” he said.

Market downs which were served by the railways grew at the expense of the others, he says, while the tourism industry at the coast benefited from the influx of passengers from London, the Midlands and the North.

“When they built these stations, they were often one of the most prestigious buildings in the town,” he says.

“In the mid-1800s, it may have been the Town Hall, but because the railways were so important the railway companies and the town often built a really big station.

“There were some where the residents and local people didn’t want the station in the middle of the towns because they didn’t want these dirty trains chuffing through.”

The railway was late coming to Bournemouth. Bournemouth station did not open until 1870 and was renamed Bournemouth Central after Bournemouth West station opened in 1874. Just as some objectors feared, the railway brought tourists from all over the country. The story was similar in Weymouth.

Mr Oakley and his wife grew up in Weymouth but he now lives in Bristol. He has written a series of books about stations.

“I did a little book on Dorset and went on to do all the other counties in the South West. I always wanted to do a bigger book on Dorset. It’s probably the last one of the series but I was very pleased with it,” he says.

He admits to not being an expert on locomotives or railway timetables, because he has always been more interested in the stations themselves.

“There are literally hundreds of books about railways all over the place but when I started all this there seemed to be a gap in the market concentrating on the stations,” he says.

“I was a town and country planner in my professional life and I was interested in them and interested with Dorset. With the series of books, we sold over 14,000 copies all along the south west but this is the one I wanted to do most.”

He is conscious of how large the railways once loomed in everyday life. “The staff were pillars of the local community. The station master would be on the parish council, if he wasn’t the chairman,” he says.

The book includes pictures of the stations in their heyday above views of similar scenes today.

Where the station has vanished, it has sometimes left traces in the presence of a footbridge, a former railway hotel or even a stretch of platform. The main section of the book features photographs of all the stations where some reminder of the railway survives.

They range from Ashley Heath Halt, a stretch of whose platform is still there, to Wimborne, whose station building is there still there, with Riverside Business Park on much of the station site.

Mr Oakley’s research involved revisiting all the stations.

“In 1999, when I did a small book, I visited them all. This time I went around and looked at them all again,” he said.

“So many books on railways are by authors around the country and they don’t go there. I’ve been to see all these stations in a six-month period.”

While much of the book is inevitably devoted to stations that disappeared in cuts of the 1960s, Mr Oakley praises the way some have been preserved.

“Bournemouth station is wonderful,” he says.

“It was severely damaged in the 1990s gales. It was a dreadful place for a while. They must have spent millions on that station.”

* Dorset Stations: Then and Now costs £10 in hardback from Dovecote Press.