GENERATIONS of cinema-goers know it as the place where Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson realised they could never be together in the classic film Brief Encounter.

Now a local antiques dealer is helping movie buffs to take a trip down memory lane by making the refreshment room at Carnforth railway station appear just how it did in the 1945 film.

Peter Crossley, who owns Holden Wood Antiques in Grane Road, Haslingden with wife Mary and friend John Ainscough, has spent 12 months and more than £1,500 painstakingly buying up tables and chairs, clocks, pictures, vases, a cash till and other antiques to ensure that the room became an exact replica of how it appears in the film.

Peter, of Craven's Brow, Blackburn, got involved in the restoration project after visiting the station four years ago.

He said: "I love all the old films and we visited the station hoping to relive the Brief Encounter experience, but came away disappointed because years of neglect had left it in a real mess.

"But they said at the time that they were going to refurbish it. So I wrote a note in the visitors' book telling them to give me a call if they needed any help with antiques as part of the plans to replicate the refreshment room."

Three years later the Friends of Carnforth Station and Trust - which has dedicated itself to restoring the station to its former glory - contacted Peter to take him up on his offer.

With a little bit of help from his friends in the antiques trade, who agreed to sell him any of the pieces he needed at cost price, and after replaying the scenes from the buffet room again and again, he has managed to recreate the scene in fantastic detail and it will be officially opened to the public as a working tea room on October 17.

Peter, who worked at Walker Steel in Blackburn before starting his own business, said: "It is very nostalgic and very evocative when you walk into it - it is like stepping back in time.

"I have watched the film so many times that I have become a real anorak, but it was important to get all the details right, even down to how high the pictures are hung on the wall.

"I am really happy with what we have done and I think it will really touch people when they visit it."

Peter Davies from Friends of Carnforth Station and Trust said: "A great deal of thought and effort has gone into the planning of the refreshment room, to get it just right and, with the help of Holden Wood Antiques, the look and feel is as near identical to the film as possible."

Carnforth Station and Railway Trust was formed in 1996 to try and regenerate the station. After years of hard work the building nearest to the town centre was refurbished and opened as the Gateway building.

The refreshment room lies at the heart of the newly refurbished island platform buildings.