Keen cyclist and explorer of disused railways. My aim is to eventually photograph every disused and heritage railway station in Great Britain and as many as possible beyond. My only criterion is that the station site still has something substantial that is railway related - a building or a platform, even some artwork, so excluding those stations that have completely gone.

At the height of Britain’s railways at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, there were approaching 10,000 stations in total on the network. After several decades of decline and losses, culminating in the Beeching Report and the most radical round of closures yet in the 1960s, a little over a quarter of that number are left (a little more than 2,500 in fact). Some lines closed to passengers soldiered on as goods railways for a few years or decades more, and stations on them were left to rot. Many others were closed on lines that remained open as local services were culled at the expense of Inter City.

So what has become of the 6,800-odd stations that were closed? Many in the years since have been obliterated altogether – replaced by housing developments, industrial estates or car parks, often as a result of the piecemeal sale of land. Others, of course, have been luckier, preserved on heritage railways, whether in the same place or moved from their original location, and yet more have been restored or partly restored while their railways have been turned into footpaths and cycleways. Some are forlorn and overgrown platforms, their buildings long since demolished, others survive as museums, cafés or offices, and a great many as private houses, retaining varying amounts of their railway past. A few, mostly in very remote locations, are derelict, slowly returning to nature despite surviving intact for decades.

The purpose of this collection is to provide the best possible views of these old stations. I won’t bother with those that are lost forever, but I will try to provide photos of as many as possible of the thousands of stations not used as such by Network Rail or regional transport networks but which retain at least some element of their railway past. I will not knowingly invade anyone’s privacy or trespass on anyone’s land, but I shall endeavour to capture something of these stations. I may also include substantial disused parts of working stations – like Christs Hospital in Sussex or Penistone in Yorkshire. Occasionally you will see photos of former station sites remembered with artworks but where nothing of the original remains – Blacon in Cheshire is one example.

You may wonder why I have chosen to include working heritage stations in this collection. The reason is that the difference between a functioning station that transports people from A to B, and a museum with working exhibits is not always clear-cut. Take for example Isfield in Sussex or Rushden in Northants, which have trains running in and out of them but only along very short sections of track. And anyway, heritage railways – whether they are short lines like these or bigger working railways like the West Somerset or North York Moors – were themselves victims of closure at some point in their existence - that's why they are what they are now. The same goes for most of the many narrow gauge railways. There are exceptions, like Horsted Keynes, which never closed because its life as a British Rail station on a branch from Haywards Heath overlapped briefly with the coming of the Bluebell Railway to its other line, the East Grinstead-Lewes branch; or Okehampton, which I photographed as a heritage station but which now has a regular passenger service from Exeter again. The purpose is to remember and celebrate Britain’s railway past and to some extent its present, not dwell on its darkest hours. That said, I will not be including miniature railway stations, unless they are built on the site of full-size stations, or funicular railway stations. I will also not include remains of stations that have been resited a short distance away.

I should stress that this site is only for recent photos. There are plenty of enthusiasts out there with photo collections from the 50s and 60s or earlier who are better placed than me to offer illustrations of now disused stations in their former glory. Nick Catford's Disused Stations site is an obvious place to start for that. And among the many video channels exploring old railways, there is Paul and Rebecca Whitewick's Every Disused Station series, or Dumpman's films.

I’ve only covered a fraction of the stations so far, with the highest concentration in South-East England or East Anglia. I do hope, one way or another, to have pictures of most of them eventually, but if in the meantime anyone is able to offer me photos of stations not currently in my collection, I would be most grateful. I will of course credit the author. But, as I say, I’m only showing modern photos, so nothing, please, earlier than about 2015. Also, I’d really appreciate any help getting access to some of the many stations I’ve been unable to photograph satisfactorily because of their location on private land.

I mentioned also that I would go beyond the British Isles. For obvious reasons I will not be attempting a comprehensive collection, even in the closest European countries, so I will most likely restrict my efforts to the most accessible, namely stations on old railways converted into cycle routes and/or in major urban centres, as well as heritage stations. But my experience so far of research in France and Spain has shown that many of their closures came later than in the UK, and the routes (and stations) were more likely to survive intact into the current era of cycle tourism and conversion into cycleways. So I hope to find many more stations on the continent of Europe.

I am also offering three galleries - one of British and Irish, the second of the rest of Europe and the third the rest of the world - of mostly recent photos of disused stations by other Flickr members. Please flag to me if you have anything you'd like included.