"Completed? It has been in operation for years."
"Why, that's odd. I never heard of it."
"Well, neither, apparently, has anyone else. You see, it ends nowhere, except alongside a shingly beach, where one or two summer cottages have been built; there was no general purchase or leasing of the plots of land that Sir Phillip expected."
"Had he any running arrangement with the Great Southern Railway?"
"That was just the trouble. He had not. His little line was not joined to theirs, although it ran alongside a platform connected with Oaklands Station, which, since the short line was built, has been named Oaklands Junction, but Oaklands is a station where none but the slowest trains stop, and only two of them, therefore even if there had been a town at Gorham-on-Sea, as Sanderson called his prospective village, because it joins Gorham Manor, comparatively few people from London would have come, because it takes more than three hours to arrive there, by trains stopping at every station, whereas Brighton can be reached from London in an hour, and other places along the coast at times varying from an hour-and-a-half to two hours, by express train."
"Did he ever ask the Great Southern to stop an express at the Junction?"
"Oh, of course, but they always pointed out that
