A MUSEUM in the centre of Wisbech, a Georgian town of 30,000 souls in East Anglia, proudly displays the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations”. Those were days in which Wisbech prospered. The frenzy of railway building in the 19th century gave the town three stations. Now it has none. The last passenger train left in 1968, five years after the report by Richard Beeching, chairman of British Railways, on the future of rail, which led to the closure of nearly a third of Britain’s 17,000 miles of track and a third of its 7,000 stations. The town has suffered economically.

Yet Wisbech, like many towns cut off from the rail network, is now expecting great things. In recent years several hundred miles of railways around the country have been restored. As roads clog up and urban house prices climb, commuters, environmentalists and local politicians are pushing for more old lines to be re-opened. Some 200 proposals have been put forward, says Andrew Allen of the Campaign for Better Transport, a lobby group.

It is a remarkable new trend. After the war, many thought that roads would rule and rail would go the way of canals. When Milton Keynes, a new town, was built 55 miles north of London in the 1960s, it was deemed not to need a station. One was at last opened in 1982. In 2015 6.6m journeys started or ended there. Traffic on other restored lines has boomed, too. The track that re-opened in 2015 from Edinburgh to the Borders expected 650,000 journeys in its first year. Half a million were made in the first five months.

The process of re-opening is laborious. Feasibility studies take years. But with rail journeys doubling in the past two decades, Whitehall now realises it may be easier and cheaper to add rail capacity this way than through pharaonic projects such as HS2, a high-speed link north from London, set to cost over £45 billion ($64 billion).

It is the growth of Cambridge, 40 miles to the south and a centre for high-tech, that has provided the impetus for re-connecting Wisbech. A new station is opening at the Cambridge Science Park and it is hoped that the old line to Oxford will be restored by 2024. The Wisbech rail link would halve travel time to 40 minutes. Cambridge has lots of jobs and Wisbech has cheap houses (the average price is around £150,000 compared with £398,000 in Cambridge), with a recent local plan proposing 10,000 more. If the link goes ahead, the government would meet most of the £100m cost.

Devolution has played a role in recent re-connections. Many of the new lines are in Scotland, Wales or the big cities, which have control over local transport and can push and finance them. In the English shires no single body oversees the process, says Chris Austin, a rail expert. Greg Clark, the secretary of state for local government, visited Wisbech in March and insisted that money for the line was not dependent on East Anglia accepting devolution. Some locals, wary of having foisted upon them the regional mayor that was a condition of other devolution deals, still worry.

With government money tight, other areas are tapping different sources for the cash to re-open lines. In the south-west, Kilbride, a developer, is putting £11.5m towards a rail link into Plymouth as part of a deal to build 750 new homes at Tavistock.

Britain is not expecting another Dickensian railway boom. Perhaps 700-800 miles of lines closed by Beeching will be restored in total, says Mr Austin. But sometimes small amounts of investment can make a big difference.