There's little sign today of Rowley railway station in its original location high up amid the stark, windswept beauty of Weardale.
Where trains once stopped, a few miles west of Consett on the old Stanhope and Tyne line, now you'll find a picnic site boasting rolling views across rural County Durham. And, apart from roaming flocks of sheep, the other living creatures you're most likely to see are cyclists riding eastward and taking advantage of the area's favourable downward gradient on this Waskerley Way section of the Coast to Coast route.
The station was opened in 1845 as Cold Rowley - initially under the auspices of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and later the North Eastern Railway - becoming plain old Rowley 13 years later.
READ MORE: Tyneside in 1968: 10 photographs from around our region 55 years ago
The station's exposed hilly location meant local rail services could be disrupted by severe winter weather. In 1910, for example, the Blackhill to Darlington train had to be held there from 6.53pm on Friday, January 28 until 4.30pm on Sunday, January 30, because the line ahead was blocked by heavy snow.
Like so many rural stops, the early decades of the 20th century saw a sharp fall in passenger numbers, and after 1939 the station was only open to goods trains. It closed completely in 1966, and the remaining mineral line lasted until 1969. Our main image from the ChronicleLive archive recalls the disused station as it was 55 years ago in March 1968.
If many defunct railway stations across the country would simply vanish into oblivion, Rowley would live on - albeit in a new location. In 1972, the station was removed and gradually rebuilt brick by brick 13 miles away at the new open-air Beamish Museum, as part of the grand vision of the museum's creator Frank Atkinson.
The reborn station was officially opened by the poet laureate and railway enthusiast Sir John Betjeman in July 1976. Betjeman even wrote a dedicated poem for the new attraction, part of which read: "Stand on the platform, feelings of God knows where come welling up inside you that you share with all the people who have been here before when this was Rowley. And because it's Rowley, even though it's in Beamish, it is holy."
Today, the station, alongside period rolling stock, a signal box and goods yard, forms part of an impressive North Eastern Railway exhibit at Beamish Museum, set in the halcyon North East world of 1913, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Great War.
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