Acton Bridge is a village in Cheshire, with picturesque old cottages, scenic river walks, and convenient access to the Weaver Navigation Canal. There's a handy bicycle path, an inn, and a handful of eateries. The town council has been proactive in defending the region's natural beauty from such eyesores as power substations for the railroad. Their current battle is against the building of a wind farm.
I don't know any of this from having spent an hour of my life in a train at the Acton Bridge station, but from websites. I looked up now and again from the episodic first section of Life of Pi to the dense, well-maintained hedges blocking the two tracks through the station from the idyllic nearby country views. We waited impatiently for a broken-down train, somewhere ahead of us on the tracks, to be towed, and permit us to continue our journey southwards into sunset. Acton Bridge was a coincidence, an unplanned stop, an anonymous pair of tracks somewhere not too far north of Crewe.
I spent an hour there, in a place I still haven't been to.
