It’s strange how ideas for books come to me.  I’ve been wondering for a while how long to continue the ‘Saltbury’ series.  The next book, ‘Martine’ will be out in July.  After that I have two books part written, and then there’s ‘Gold’ which is finished, and which, I confess, I love.

But then what?  I don’t want the series to go on forever, but I sort of know how it ends, and I’m not ready for that yet (don’t panic, it’s nothing terrible).  So I needed a follow up.  ‘Gold’ is a Tina book, so the next one would be Hazel and set around 2010, when Haze is 25.

Now I’m a bit of a tyrant with my characters, at least when they let me, and I have the outlines of their lives mapped out through this period.  But I’m always on the lookout for extra details. They give atmosphere.

Well, I’ve always loved trains.  I don’t know much about them.  I just like to watch them go by and sometimes, when the weather is nice, I go to a little station near here to sit on a bench and write.

Do you remember the bit in ‘Haze’, when Annie and Hazel are first getting to know one another and Annie takes Haze on a nature ramble around Wyeburn?  They end up standing on a bridge over the railway, because Annie too loves trains.  But nature remains her real love, so now we have her well on the road to recovery, she’s probably yearning to get out of London and back to the countryside.  If so, where better than Wyeburn?  The trouble is that houses for sale in pretty villages like that tend to be very rare.

But then I thought: suppose little Wyeburn once had a station?  Huge numbers of small village stations were built in Britain in the 19^th century.  Most of them closed long ago, whether or not the line itself remains open, and many were demolished soon after.  But a few survive as offices, cafes, staff accommodation or even holiday homes.  What I didn’t know was a station on a still-active line that had become a private house.

Now I might not know much about railways, but I have a friend who does.  He actually writes books on the subject and when I mentioned this to him, he sent me the picture above.  It’s a station in Staffordshire that’s now a house, and you can watch the trains from its windows.  Isn’t the architecture lovely?  In my alternative Saltbury universe, I’m sure it would just love to be in Wiltshire and home to Annie and Hazel.