Spurn Point had been militarised since 1805, when the Napoleonic Wars made every spot of strategically important coast into a potential battery position. The point - a three-mile sandspit curving into the Humber's mouth - controlled the approach to Hull and Grimsby. When the First World War was declared in 1914, the number of soldiers on the spit increased overnight. They needed to be supplied. The roads were narrow, twisting tracks running across dune and shingle, washed out at every spring tide. A railway was the obvious answer. The War Department bought the necessary land from the local landowning family and commissioned C. J. Wills and Company to build the line.

Wills laid the track using rails and other material acquired second-hand from the Great Central Railway and the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway - both being absorbed or reorganised at the time, both with surplus track to sell. The contractors also brought down five standard-gauge steam tank engines to help build the line. When the line opened in 1915, one of the engines was left behind to work the railway, and it stayed there for years afterwards. The track ran from Kilnsea at the inland end of the spit, down the length of the peninsula, all the way out to the jetty at Spurn Point itself. Goods came in by boat at the jetty - ammunition, coal, food, building materials - and went out by rail to the various fortifications and batteries along the spit. The line had no stations and was not connected to the rest of the British rail network.

What officially appeared as a military supply line was, unofficially, also the main road for everyone who lived on Spurn Point - and the local people did something with it that no one had really planned for. They built home-made bogie wagons - small flatbeds on flanged wheels - and used the wind to sail them up and down the railway. With the prevailing westerlies running across the spit, a wind-driven bogie could move surprisingly fast. There are accounts of notable crashes when sailing bogies collided with trains coming the other way. The trains, slow but indifferent, generally won the encounters. The hobby persisted because the alternative was walking three miles each way across loose sand. The railway became, by improvisation, the only practical transport for civilians on a spit too small to need any other kind of road.

A short distance north of the lighthouse stood the engine shed - two tracks under cover, where the tank engines waited between runs. There were no signalling complexities, no junctions of importance, just a single line running the length of the spit with passing loops where they were needed. The whole operation was, by railway standards, miniature. By Spurn Point standards, it was a major piece of infrastructure - the only piece on the entire peninsula that could move serious tonnage. During the First World War it kept the coastal defences fed. During the Second World War it did the same thing again. It outlasted both conflicts and ran on through the immediate post-war years.

The line closed in 1951 as a post-war economy measure. A road replaced it - and the road was ironically built from materials brought in by the very railway it was about to make redundant. Between 1956 and 1959 Spurn Head was demilitarised in stages, the batteries and fortifications dismantled, the soldiers withdrawn. Many of the Cold War installations further north along the coast lingered for decades afterwards, but the spit itself reverted to civilian use, eventually becoming a Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve. Apart from a few short sections of rail sunk into tarmac and concrete around the lighthouse, almost nothing remains of the railway. The road sections with embedded rails get pushed out of alignment by every major storm. The track tilts. It curves. It points off into the sea, as if the line were still running and the destination had simply been washed away. Which, in a sense, is true. Materials from the dismantled road, the old military buildings and the railway itself have been re-purposed across Spurn Head, used to reinforce the washover section where the sea regularly breaches the spit. The railway, in fragments, now holds the spit together.