The start of the Western Front

A wee bit of overgrown rail and two curved platforms but for many men this was the last piece of England they stood on before embarking to France and the bloody battlefields of Flanders. This is Folkestone Harbour station and although it was closed to rail passengers from November, 1915 to March, 1919 over ten million people and more than a million tons of freight passed through here during the First World War. The station sits on the harbour arm from which ships ferried men and materiel across the Channel, often returning with the wounded and prisoners of war. Trains took the wounded to hospitals across Kent or in London. Although many of the troops who passed through here would have been marched down Remembrance Road from Shorncliffe Barracks the station handled more than 7,000 military service trains and a further 8,500 South Eastern and Chatham Railway trains during the war. The ferries ran day and night to get men across and warships from the Dover Patrol were tasked with keeping a corridor free from the risk of enemy attack.

Further round is a room used as a café run by volunteers and they provided servicemen and nurses with free tea before they sailed. The volunteers had a visitors book and more than 40,000 signatures including Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle and David Lloyd George. The contents of the visitors books have been digitised and are now online.  

I thought that this would make a fitting location for my Armistice Day blip; Lest we forget