As part of Southeast Communities Rail Partnership project to produce 200 Blue Plaques for Railway 200, here is the story of Lottie Martin.

Seven year old Lottie Martin was out picking primroses with her sister Mary and their 19 year old nurse maid Ellen Bird on Wednesday 18 April 1883. At Langborough railway crossing Lottie sat on the stile as they waited for a luggage train to pass. Shortly before 6pm, she promptly jumped down to cross the tracks. But at the same time a London & South Western passenger train, running 3 minutes late and obscured by the first, was coming in the opposite direction. Totally unaware, Lottie was struck by it and killed immediately. The driver himself, Edmund Mann, didn’t realise what had happened until he received a telegram on his train’s arrival at Reading Station.

Lottie was born in Wokingham in 1876; the youngest of six children to Hannah Smith and local baker Henry Martin, whose bakery was at 27 Denmark Street, Wokingham for many years (where The Lazy Frog Massage shop is now). Her brother Weston, a fire brigade member and baker like his father, continued the family’s bakery business until his death in 1955.

A few months after Lottie’s death, a wooden footbridge was erected over Langborough crossing, and the Railway Company  decided to build a permanent bridge and a new station building at Wokingham. There is a Wokingham Society blue plaque commemorating the unusual construction of the bridge in 1886 from re-used rails but I’m really pleased this project has rediscovered Lottie’s tragic part in it.

Research and imagery; Danny Coope.