Shippea Hill station in Cambridgeshire is used by a grand total of one person a month. It’s certainly not a place that feels full of life today, but it wasn’t always this way

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You don’t see much out the window as the 7.04 from Cambridge to Norwich rattles across the Fens on a dank December morning – fields, mainly, which start to take shape as the sun rises somewhere behind the gloom. Then the train slows down and, out of nowhere, a platform appears. Kash, the conductor, seemed surprised when I had requested the stop. “Oh, this is very rare,” he said before alerting the driver. “Very rare.”

Only one pair of doors open. I step out on to the empty platform, with no idea where to go. As the train pulls away – right on time, at 7.28am – I’m alone. By the time the third carriage rushes past, Kash is a blur as he leans out of his window. “Have fun!” he shouts into the half-light. A cold wind strikes my face as silence returns to Britain’s quietest train station.

Shippea Hill barely clings to the rail network. According to ticket sales figures published this week by the Office of Road and Rail, 12 people used it in the year to last April, fewer than any other station. With one small step I have just increased its annual footfall by more than 8%. You’re welcome, Shippea Hill. But am I?

It’s hard to imagine a more desolate place to get off a train. Shipping containers for sale stand in a muddy yard behind the far platform, opposite the pitched-roof signal box, now shuttered. Otherwise the view is of field after field, some showing maize stumps, others now peat-black and ploughed.

On weekdays, one train stops here on its way to Norwich, if requested. That’s it. It comes once on a Saturday and not at all on Sundays. No trains stop on their way back to Cambridge, which adds to the sense of isolation under the tiny platform shelter. Someone has carved “I love you Mel Nunn” into the unused bench. Mel Nunn probably doesn’t know.

I’m almost startled when a young woman appears from a parked car. She is delighted to spot whom she thinks is Shippea Hill’s monthly passenger. Joanne, a reporter at a Cambridge news agency, is here on a speculative assignment for the Daily Mail. Her face drops when I break it to her that I, too, am a journalist. “Did anyone else get off?” she asks. Nobody. She drives back to Cambridge.

There is nothing to do in Shippea Hill, nor any safety in walking along the A1101, which falls steeply into dykes on either side. Black birds sit along the telephone wires. A temporary hostel for seasonal vegetable-pickers lies on one side of the railway, down a muddy track. There’s no answer at the house by the road, a former pub. I skip over the tracks and down another lane. It leads to Railway Cottage, which has seen better days.

“Powdered milk or long-life?” asks Peter Mingay, who lives here with his partner, Polly Wainwright, and their 10 racing greyhounds. Peter makes the tea while Malicious Gossip, otherwise known as Nelly, slurps her breakfast. The couple have lived 150 metres from the station for 10 years, but have never caught a train. “Before they changed the level crossing to electric about four years ago, they had a chap up there in the signal box,” Wainwright, 62, says. “They had a generator, so when there was a power cut we’d go up there and he’d put the kettle on.”

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The couple moved here so that their dogs could bark without disturbing anyone. They used to live three miles down track in Prickwillow, site of the annual Prickwillow Ploughing festival. That village lost its station in 1850, five years after it and Shippea Hill were opened during the great Victorian “railway mania”. Top-hatted planners hurriedly drew lines between towns, plonking stations at reasonable intervals. Some, like Prickwillow, failed fast. Others were vital, until they weren’t.

When the Beeching report threatened to fillet hundreds of lines and stations in the early 1960s, it was easier and cheaper in many cases to reduce services to almost nothing. The railway company Greater Anglia, which operates the Cambridge to Norwich line, confirms that Shippea Hill station, which now serves primarily as an automated level crossing, requires minimal maintenance.

It wasn’t always like this. In nearby Ely, Harry Bye, a month short of his 100th birthday, remembers the last of the station’s glory days. He got a job as a porter in 1955, when Shippea Hill was still used to distribute vegetables across the region and to London. “I used to climb up the signals and fill the lamps,” he says. “It was still all steam trains then, and there’d be a lot of shunting in the yard. We had two freight trains leave a day. We’d call them the Shippea Hills. I’ve seen 35 trucks of cauliflowers go away on the train, and there used to be celery and potatoes – all of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shippea Hill station now serves primarily as an automated level crossing. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Bye retired as a signalman in 1982, by which time Shippea Hill had lost its porters and ticket officers. He has lived alone in the same house since his wife died in 1987. He keeps photos of the busy days, when hundreds of passengers used the station, including airmen from nearby RAF Lakenheath. “But times change, don’t they,” he says in a break between writing his Christmas cards.

Lorries killed the vegetable trains, and the narrow stretch of road past Shippea Hill is known to some locals as the Casserole Highway, thanks to the frequency of shed loads. Chris and Kate Fulford live with their three children in the former schoolhouse on a sharp corner, 300 metres from the station. A church and village hall have long disappeared, and the school closed in the 1970s as farms merged and the village died. But the Fulfords, who have never used the station, are joining forces with other young families now finding affordable homes in the wider area. “We’re planning to all catch the train to Norwich one Saturday and show that there’s still life here,” says Chris, 39, an architectural technician. “If we get the numbers up, perhaps they’ll provide a proper service again.”