First impressions count

It’s a funny thing, going to visit a house you own but have never seen for the first time. There is, to put it mildly, a degree of anticipation. So it was with an element of trepidation that, after a couple of days of traditional Danish Christmas with the in-laws – which mostly involved eating – we drove down to the island of Lolland for my introduction to Onsevig Station.

It was a vile day, of the kind that southern Denmark does so well in winter; cold, grey, bleak, a day straight out of some gritty Scandinavian crime drama. The drive takes around two hours on the mercifully quiet Danish motorways, but first we had to stop in the nearest town, Nakskov, to pick up the keys. The hire car had no sat-nav, the Good Lady Wife (GLW) had only visited the place once before, and we had no map, so things were starting to get tense.

Keys safely in our possession, there followed a degree of lively discussion as we tried to navigate the maze of roads between Nakskov and Horslunde. It was growing dark when the GLW finally had a eureka moment, recognising the illuminated white church rising out of the trees ahead.

Finally, we pulled into the drive and there it was; Onsevig Station. The first thing that struck me was the size of the place; it looms out of the trees like a small castle. But I had little time to ponder before we were all out of the car and standing on the doorstep. The next challenge; a ‘quirky’ lock. One of those locks that has a ‘knack’ to it, don’t you love them? A knack that is perfectly straightforward once you have mastered it, but which causes feelings of rising panic when you realise you are in remote rural Denmark, it’s cold, getting dark, and you can’t get in the house. A few minutes of frantic jiggling later and we were in.

Second impression; the smell. That smell of damp and ‘other people’ that I associate for some reason with childhood holiday cottages (though I don’t remember any of them ever being damp). The smell of a house where somebody else has lived, for quite some time, but not recently. Not, to be honest, a great smell. But hey, it was our smell now; we were in. Owners of a genuine, pre-loved Danish railway station. Time for the adventure to begin…

Addendum

I take back everything I said about southern Denmark being climatically similar to Tyneside; over the last few days Onsevig Station has enjoyed temperatures as low, allowing for wind-chill, as -25C.

I think even the young lads of Sunderland would be tempted to put a coat on for their Saturday night out under those circumstances.

A geography lesson

I was just asked if there was snow in Denmark at the moment. It’s a perfectly reasonable question; they generally have more snow that we do. But I think the question was prompted by the same thing that prompts a lot of comments I get about Denmark, comments about the long summer days, the fjords, the Northern Lights. It comes down to a basic lack of geographical knowledge, one that I freely admit I used to share. You see, in the UK we tend to lump all Scandinavian countries together into one, big Nordic super-country. They are all, in our heads, just shy of the Arctic Circle, plunged into darkness for six months of the year and permanently blanketed with snow.

It turns out that’s not quite the case. Onsevig Station, for instance, is on the same latitude as Sunderland, not a town known, as far as I’m aware, for its displays of aurora borealis. 

Sunny Sunderland

There are indeed fjords in Denmark, but the land rises sheer from the chilly water to a height of, oh, maybe two metres in the lumpier sand dunes. You see, Denmark is basically an extra bit of Germany. Don’t tell the Danes I said that – they’d hate it – but it is. It’s a bit of Germany and some islands in the Baltic, and much of it looks like Leicestershire; gently rolling agricultural land with an awful lot of wheat.

Denmark. NOT Germany

To be fair, my experience is almost entirely limited to the central island of Sjælland; things on the peninsula of Jylland, thrust up towards the coast of Norway, may be very different. But I think I’ll be leaving the polar bear repellent at home.

Announcement

Onsevig Station now belongs to us.

That is all.

An explanation is in order

So, you may be asking yourselves – why a station in Denmark? That’s a two-part question, really. Firstly, why a property in Denmark at all? And secondly, why a station?

The first answer is easy; property in Denmark is cheap. Seriously cheap. It would be vulgar to discuss the price of Onsevig Station here, but let’s just say you could buy a decent car for the money in the UK, but nothing you could live in. The downside, and the reason why the ‘Homes Under the Hammer’ brigade haven’t indulged in a feeding frenzy, is that you have to be a Danish citizen in order to buy a house there. Luckily for us, the Good Lady Wife (henceforth the GLW) has dual citizenship. She has a Danish passport and everything, and as such is entitled to purchase the house of her choice.

So to the second part of the question – why a station? Well, why not? Rural Denmark is littered with lovely properties, and the GLW browses the estate agents’ websites of an evening in much the same way that I look at guitar sites. Onsevig Station caught her eye, and on a visit to her sister she arranged to have a look at it, fell in love, and the rest is history.

In which we buy a station

I'll put my cards on the table here, right up front. I'm a trainspotter. There; I said it. To be fair, I don't go and sit on stations with a notebook any more. I own neither an anorak nor a selection of Ian Allan railway books. I'm not even particularly interested in modern locomotives; things have moved on, and I simply don't recognise most of them. 

Neither am I a steam nostalgia junkie. Steam was already a fading memory when I took up the hobby, back in the 70s. No, those were days of the diesel locomotive, and the first tentative trials of the Intercity 125 High Speed Train. For me, trainspotting was the mighty English Electric Deltics thundering up the East Coast main line, the evocatively named Class 44 'Peaks' - Whernside, Ingleborough and Skiddaw - running container freight through Beighton, the vast sprawl of Tinsley marshalling yard with its Class 13 shunters. Whilst most of my contemporaries never travelled further than Skegness, I was  exploring the far-flung corners of Britain in search of obscure locos. If Crewe can be considered far-flung.

That's how I've always justified it, anyway, in the face of the inevitable mockery; a healthy life of fresh air and travel, satisfying the y-chromosome's joint cravings for machinery and tick-lists. A time comes, however, to put away childish things, particularly those childish things that provoke derision in the opposite gender. And so my days of huddling on freezing stations (why are stations always so cold?) are long gone.

But trainspotting is one of those things which, once begun, is almost impossible to stop. Even now, I could no more see a train and not make a mental note of its number than I could, I don't know, stop blinking indefinitely. Too many misspent days frantically scribbling down carriage numbers have created in me a kind of reflex, an involuntary twitch of the eyes towards the number on any piece of railway rolling stock. And the love is still there, in the blood. When I heard that a couple of Deltics were coming down to Sussex from their preserved home at Barrow Hill, yes, I turned out to see them. And yes, it was freezing cold. And yes, they were still magnificent.

So it is with a mixture of shock and excitement that I can announce, here today, that we are buying a station.

That's right. We are buying a railway station.

Okay, it's not an English station. It isn't on a working railway line, so there are no trains. But it's still a station, and therefore very special.

As I write, we are still jumping through the inevitable legal and financial hoops, but things look good. Barring major catastrophes, we could be in by Christmas. This Christmas, as in 'less than a month away.' Oh, and I've just bought a new anorak.