CHESHIRE

Holmes Chapel station library

“A day return to Crewe, please, and I’ll take this . . .” Tracey Robinson pushes a copy of C. J. Sansom’s Dissolution across the counter at this quiet station in rural Cheshire.

Robinson is a regular at Holmes Chapel Book Club, possibly the only lending library on a British station. Its 350 books fill two racks in the waiting room, where Graham Blake, the “Customer Adviser” (aka stationmaster, pictured in the foreground, left), has added a couple of dining chairs, a coffee table and pots of tomato plants.

Blake started the library in April for commuters to Manchester via Alderley Edge: “I thought if I brought some books in, it would help people pass the time on the journey every day,” he says and breaks off to issue two Saver Returns to Chester.

He put out an appeal and passengers quickly obliged – some heaved in binliners full of books. Crime, Catherine Cookson, Danielle Steel and football and entertainment biographies are most popular with his 200 regular borrowers. So far, however, an omnibus edition of Orwell’s novels has had no takers.

Blake enthuses about the strong community feel and has devised a neat slogan for reading on trains: “It beats counting cows in a field.”

The 12:17 to Crewe pulls in and Tracey Robinson gets on, clutching her Dissolution, a Tudor murder mystery described as a glimpse of “a quietly bubbling cesspool of corruption, lust and avarice”.

As Gwendolen Fairfax says in The Importance of Being Earnest: “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

NORTHUMBERLAND

Barter Books

It has been called “the British Library of secondhand bookshops”, but “the St Pancras of secondhand bookshops” would do just as well. It spreads extravagantly through the old Victorian station at Alnwick in Northumberland. The station closed in 1968 and was used as a fertiliser store until 1991, when Stuart and Mary Manley converted it into one of Britain’s biggest secondhand bookshops. Today, 28 full and part-time staff shift 5,000 books a week, more than many shops shift in a year.

Some 300,000 titles cover three miles of shelves snaking along the old canopied platforms, with music books in the Ladies First Class Waiting Room and thrillers in the Booking Hall.

A lively mural shows 40 writers, painted life-size by the Alnwick artist Peter Dodd. Orwell hurls a book at Hemingway, who flexes his muscles for Dorothy Parker as Beckett looks on, full of disdain for such macho posturing.

The Manleys have 200,000 visitors a year, some taking the bus from Alnmouth, the nearest working station (three miles).

“We discovered early on that there are plenty of people who spend their holidays seeking out secondhand bookshops, so we realised our business was as much tourism as books,” Stuart says.

Hence the model train chugging along the shelf-tops, the open fires and the laidback, browser-friendly atmosphere. Hence also the antiélitism, running to Mills & Boon “granny packs” of six.

A pulping skip, however, awaits surplus stock. “When you first start, you think ‘Never destroy a book’, but you soon realise there are plenty of books that need destroying,” Stuart says. “In five years’ time, there’ll be 40 million surplus Da Vinci Codes. As for Harry Potter . . .” Barter Books, Alnwick Station, Northumberland: 01665 604888, www.barterbooks.co.uk

LINCOLNSHIRE

Stamford railway bookshop

As well as selling railway books, Robert Humm publishes them. Stacked in his shop on Stamford station in Lincolnshire is the latest edition of one of his titles: Railways and Motive Power of Argentina.

“It’s a real number-cruncher’s book, 516 pages of lists of locomotives,” Humm says. Then he confesses: long before he became a bookseller, he was a number-cruncher himself, “one of the late-Fifties platform-end mob collecting train numbers at King’s Cross”.

We tactfully avoid the term “trainspotter” as he outlines how he escaped the Civil Service to run what has become Britain’s biggest railway bookshop. He set it up in 1974 from his home in Chiswick and moved north 13 years later when the old stationmaster’s house on Platform One of Stamford station – charming, Gothic, straight out of Trollope – became vacant.

He stocks 40,000 new and secondhand books. If you crave The Narrow Gauge Railways of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Branch Lines Around Wisbech, or 60-year-old timetables, look no farther. If, however, you crave Thomas the Tank Engine, look elsewhere. This is not that sort of shop.

“Mostly, our chaps want factbooks: solid, reliable fact,” Humm says. “My biggest customer base is people who were growing up in the 1950s.

“There’s a real nostalgia for the late Fifties and early Sixties, which were the beginning of the end of the old railway system.” He intones the dread name: “Beeching.” Enthusiasts come from all over the world, he says, with about a third of them arriving by train, on the scenic line between Oakham and Peterborough.

A crescendo of rumbling sets the bookcases gently shaking, like the jug in the bedroom in Auden’s Night Mail. “Just a freight train going through,” Humm says. Robert Humm & Co: 01780 766266, www.roberthumm.co.uk

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist