Local milk... from a vending machine?

Well this is a new one... I'm well acquainted with vending machines that dish out bags of crisps and cans of coke (and some might say rather too well acquainted with one particular vending machine in my office), but I've never heard of a vending machine that sells bottles of fresh local milk.

Neil introduced me to this concept the other night. I'd requested that he pick up a bottle of Molly Milk from the shop opposite his office in Sheffield, but he got "accidentally side-tracked" by the pub (hmmmmm, I wonder how that happened) and ended up missing the shop's opening hours.

Neil commutes from Chesterfield to Sheffield by train, and on this particular evening I drove to pick him up from Chesterfield station. 

"Bet you've not got the milk, have you?" I asked him on our way back home.

"I have," he said.

"Bet it's not local milk though is it?" I accused.

"It is," he said.

"But I thought you'd not been able to get Molly Milk?" I cross-examined.

"I didn't," he said (isn't he infuriating?).

"You'd better not have been in the supermarket," I demanded.

"I haven't" he said. Smugly.

With the look of a magician conjuring up a white rabbit from his hat, Neil then produced a bottle of Woodthorpe Grange milk from his bag.

"It's local," he said. "It says on the bottle it's from a dairy farm in Ashover, Derbyshire."

"But where on earth have you got that from at 9pm at night?" I spluttered.

"From the milk vending machine on the train station platform," Neil announced proudly.

The platform vending machine

It transpires that there is actually a vending machine on the platform that dispatches bottles of fresh cold milk from this local dairy. What an absolutely brilliant idea. Whether you're buying milk to take into work for the office tea club or bringing a pint home for your tea and cornflakes the following morning, surely the option of buying it fresh and local at the train station couldn't be any more convenient?

Sadly I haven't been able to find much information online about Woodthorpe Grange. I can see its location in Ashover, and in fact we rambled past it a couple of times on country walks last summer, and it looks like it's been in business for nearly 50 years. But that's about it.

However I do know that it's the milk we sometimes buy from our local farm shop, so I've vowed to ask if they have any more information for us next time we visit.

But in the meantime it's nice to know we can get a pint from a local farm so easily.