In January 1940 the body of a woman was found in a ladies’ lavatory at Trent Station. A bottle of poison was found nearby. She was identified as Ida Lizzie Scarratt, 46, of Rough Close, near Stoke-on-Trent. She’d been reported as missing by the Staffordshire Police. The inquest heard that she was an art teacher at the Leicester College of Art. She’d been staying at her sister’s house in Longton (near Stoke) for a few days and had left to visit friends in Leicester. Three years before she’d had a nervous breakdown, from which she’d completely recovered. She was described as highly intellectual, highly strung, a deep thinker and extremely sensitive; so much that her feelings could be easily hurt. When the coroner showed her brother-in-law an entry for her diary, he broke down. The coroner didn’t read out the entry, but said it was clear she was depressed, and it was evident from the diary that she took her own life. The inquest verdict was ‘drinking carbolic acid, self-administered, while the balance of her mind was disturbed’.
In October 1944 Councillor J. Drew made a proposal to Long Eaton Council for the modernisation of Trent Station. He claimed that Trent was the greatest facility for the town, providing it could be made more accessible. He proposed extending Acton Road to Forbes Hole, which would be filled in and made into a car park and bus station, with another access via Wyvern Avenue to Tamworth Road. He further suggested that the LMS Railway could provide a covered footbridge, across the lines to the station. He even proposed that, when Long Eaton achieved borough status, the name of the borough could be ‘Trent’.
The consensus amongst the council was that Cllr Drew’s proposal was at least 10 years too late. Indeed, a similar scheme had been proposed over 40 years before. Public opinion in letters to the Long Eaton Advertiser was split. One correspondent stated ‘Trent station has always been a bugbear to the Long Eatonian, and any form or method of being able to reach this oasis in the wilderness must be welcome to all inhabitants’. Another questioned ‘who wants to go to Trent Junction – nobody, unless under extreme necessity’. A third person thought air travel would be the future and the area around Trent Station should be developed as an airport.
During the war there were no train services between Long Eaton and Trent. The service was reinstated in October 1946, with 9 trains per day.
Rail services continued during the floods of March 1947 although most of the lines were covered. Beeston station was submerged, and the water was only a foot below the platform at Nottingham Midland Station. Trent was open, although the north curve was unusable.
In June 1949 several hundred people walked back from Nottingham to Long Eaton, after seeing the illuminations to mark the 500-year anniversary of the charter given to the city by King Henry VI. Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, who had been at the event, were conveyed by train and spent the night on the north curve near Trent Station. This was one of several occasions when the royal train stopped there.