Off the rails

As a child, it was difficult for me to understand the concept of a railway office being in a place where there are no rail tracks at all. I refused to believe that this building housed a booking office of the Southern Railway, despite the large sign that said so. Even though this was a convenient option to book tickets from, I don't remember my father ever using it; in the days before computers, these 'city booking offices' would only have a limited quota of tickets they could sell - and to where we wanted to go, the quota would only be one-and-a-quarter or some such meaningless number.

I'm not sure when this office shut down, but it seems to bear out my childhood theory that you can't have a railway office too far away from the tracks!