Parting of the ways

If I had stood at that spot 70 years ago I would have been shouted at by the stationmaster or prosecuted for trespassing on the railway.
This is Redesmouth on the North British Railway. The old platforms can be seen on the left direction. Trains proceeded to Bellingham, then onward to Scotland. Trains going to the right would have gone to Morpeth and the main line from London to Edinburgh. Both directions were through deep rural countryside serving small isolated communities. All that came to an end in the mid-1950s when passenger services ended followed a few years later by freight services.