Introduction

An early station that only lasted four years

As walkers, we travel on the railways all the time and never give them a second thought. In this we have a lot in common with the Victorians who created the network we ride on today.

Though railways were a technological wonder to them, they didn’t particularly like them and they certainly weren’t nostalgic about them (see The golden age of the railways). They regarded them as a practical way to get around, and if they gave them a thought at all, it was usually to complain about them. Moans about late, uncomfortable and overcrowded trains are nothing new – they are as old as the railways themselves.

And yet as walkers we see another side to the railways from the one the commuter sees. Fast and frequent trains whisk us from central London to a wide range of rural locations, and the number of times that there significant delays to the trains are remarkably rare. The network takes us to such wonderful rural stations as Wadhurst, Southease, Pluckley or Hever, almost invariably with an hourly service that runs seven days a week, from early morning till late at night.

But how did this network come to be created? And why is it the way it is? That is what these pages set out to answer. They describe how the railway started (Beginnings) and the amazing speed with which they were developed (From London Bridge to the sea and South East to Dover). They explain why there are two ways to get to Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Ashford, Canterbury and Dover (Bitter competition - and its benefits) while there is just one to get to Winchester or Southampton (A more rational railway).

They reveal why trains from some places go into only one London terminus, while others go into two or more (Terminus wars), and why a ticket to Yalding is valid for return from Borough Green (Bitter competition).

They answer such questions as why the trains on the Marlow branch reverse direction at Bourne End (Thames and Chilterns) and why minor delays on the Hastings line so easily escalate into major hold-ups (South East to Dover). They address that perplexing question of why the main departure boards at Victoria are divided into two sections, each with the trains in chronological order (Terminus wars).

They also tell you the story behind some famous landmarks we pass on the walks – such as the Ouse Valley Viaduct (From London Bridge to the sea) and the beautiful viaduct near Eynsford (Bitter competition). They alert you to some interesting survivals from a former age, such as the tiled map of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in its heyday, which can be found in a passageway at Victoria station (Bitter competition: photos in Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor).

These pages then explain why the south east kept many of its railway lines while other parts of the country lost theirs (The sparks effect, Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor), and they provide a corrective to that curious English nostalgia for the way the railways used to be (The golden age of the railways).

Lastly, special features look at the forgotten world of London's late nineteeth century urban railways - London's Victorian railways - and the lost world of rail freight - Forgotten freight. You can also step back in time to The South East in 1960 and find out what it was like to travel by train to a country walk in the pre-Beeching era.

Hopefully, reading them will open your eyes and make the railways you travel on a bit more interesting. And then you can forget all about them and go back to taking them for granted – which is after all, what they are for.

© Peter Conway 2010-16 • All Rights Reserved

Beginnings

Primitive railways serving mines actually have quite a long history, dating back to the 17th century, with iron rails introduced in the 18th. But these “wagonways” mainly served private mines and quarries and were horse-hauled.

What is reckoned to be the first public wagonway in the world opened to the south of London in 1803 - the Surrey Iron Railway from Wandsworth to Croydon and Mitcham. In 1805 it was extended by the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway to quarries near Merstham. Though a canal opened in 1809 providing easier access, the Surrey Iron Railway lasted until 1846, and some of its original route was later used for the West Croydon to Wimbledon railway line. Part of the Merstham extension provided the route for the London & Brighton Railway in 1838.

But these wagonways were essentially just ways to move horse-drawn carts more easily and used rails different from the ones we use today. Much more sophisticated was the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway which opened in 1830, carried passengers as well as freight, and used steam power throughout. It boasted the first passenger train tunnel in the world - Tyler Hill Tunnel, whose portals can still be seen behind the University of Kent. Its stations were on the harbourfront at Whitstable and just outside the Westgate in Canterbury. In 1853 it became part of the South Eastern Railway, closing to passengers in 1931 and freight in 1952

The Canterbury & Whitstable was initially cable-hauled, however (that is, using a stationary steam engine, a bit like a funicular railway today), and so in the opinion of most historians does not count as the first railway in the modern sense of the word. That honour goes to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which opened four months later and caused a global sensation. Unlike all its predecessors it was entirely hauled by mobile steam engines – most famously, Stephenson’s Rocket – and it linked two cities. This gave it a significant passenger focus that no line had had before.

The Liverpool & Manchester set entrepreneurs thinking all over the country, and the first result in the south east came in 1836 when the London & Greenwich Railway opened, starting at what is now London Bridge station. To the amazement of its contemporaries, it was built on brick arches – 878 of them (which survive to this day and remain the longest run of brick arches ever built: this is why trains leaving London Bridge are travelling at rooftop level). In 1839 it was joined by the London & Croydon, a separate company which had its own station at London Bridge, and whose other terminus was what we now call West Croydon station. This line went through almost empty countryside, so much so that two stations were named after inns en route and one (Anerley) after an isolated house.

The London & Birmingham Railway had meanwhile opened in 1838, starting out from Euston and travelling north through the Chilterns past Berkhamsted and Tring. Just beyond Tring station it created a long cutting that required an immense amount of labour to build in the age before mechanical diggers. Though it is not much noticed today, it was considered a great engineering feat at the time.

Also in 1838 the Great Western Railway started operations out of Paddington, though the present station dates from 1854, and 1839-40 saw the opening of the London to Southampton line, which soon became the London & South Western Railway – today’s South West Trains franchise.

On the opposite side of London 1839-40 saw the start of the Eastern Counties Railway, whose initial terminus was at Shoreditch, but which became the Great Eastern Railway in 1862 and opened Liverpool Street station in 1874. Kings Cross, the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, did not open till 1852.

© Peter Conway 2010-16 • All Rights Reserved

From London Bridge to the sea

Once the first railways had been established in London (see Beginnings), lines grew rapidly in the 1840s, the years of “railway mania” when dozens of new lines were proposed each year. This was an era much like the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, when even the most fanciful schemes attracted willing investors. Like the dotcom boom it had its inevitable crash in 1848, in which railway shares fell by a third. But if investors lost money, the infrastructure still remained – much of it to this day.

One of the earliest lines was the London and Brighton Railway, which branched off from the London and Croydon Railway at Selhurst, and headed south for the coast. This was already a popular route even before the railways, as Brighton was a major town of 46,000 people (a very large population for those days), an important short break destination for wealthier Londoners, a centre for sea bathing and an embarkation point for cross-channel paddle steamers to Dieppe (which operated from the town's chainlink pier, opened in 1820). In the late 1830s there were 36 horse-drawn coaches plying the route every day, taking from four and a half to six hours.

By contrast the countryside between London and Brighton was sparsely populated. Redhill, Hayward's Heath and Hassocks did not exist - they are railway creations. On the coast Lewes, Hastings and Hythe were the only places of any size between Brighton and Dover (Eastbourne was just a few houses). In the other direction the only towns between Brighton and Portsmouth were Shoreham, Worthing and Chichester.

Because of this Brighton was regarded as a key prize by early railway companies and no fewer than six projects were presented to parliament (whose approval was - and still is - necessary to get any railway built). The line might have been built via Leatherhead and Horsham or via Oxted and Lewes, but in the end the London & Brighton's proposal won. It was for a railway on the current route, with coastal branches to Shoreham and Newhaven. The company was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1837 and construction began in 1838.

The first section to go into service, in 1840, was from Brighton to Shoreham, which was easier to build because Shoreham was a port and so construction materials could be brought in by sea. Meanwhile work was going on on the big civil engineering projects of the London to Brighton route, including the Merstham Tunnel through the North Downs, the Clayton Tunnel through the South Downs and the Ouse Valley Viaduct (pictured) just south of Balcombe. The winter version of  SWC Walk 22 Balcombe Circular passes right underneath this magnificent brick structure, which still carries the main line, but is today a bit of a bottleneck on the Brighton line as it only carries two tracks.

Though it is not obvious today, the engineers also had to contend with quite considerable gradients. The line has three summits - the Merstham and Clayton Tunnels and Balcombe - and in the days of steam the trains spent a lot of energy puffing up to them. More powerful electric trains now make the route seem almost flat.

The Ouse Valley Viaduct was completed in March 1841 and in July service started from London Bridge to Hayward's Heath, with Brighton following in September. Initially there were six trains a day, taking two and a half hours each. Right from the start there was a first class only express to London Bridge in the morning which stopped only at Croydon and took one hour 45 minutes. As early as 1845 there were first class season ticket holders using it.

Further developments included Shoreham to Worthing in 1845, and both Worthing to Chichester and Brighton to Lewes and Hastings in 1846. In the same year the London and Brighton Railway merged with the London and Croydon to become the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway. In 1947 the cut-off route to Lewes via Plumpton was opened and the coastal line reached Portsmouth. In 1849 a branch was built from Polegate to Eastbourne starting its development as a seaside resort.

1947 also saw the opening of the line from Lewes to Newhaven, which the LBSCR began to develop as a port. Two decades earlier George IV had vetoed plans for a harbour at Brighton the grounds that it would muddy the waters for sea bathing, so, as noted above, ferries to France operated from Brighton's chainlink pier. Newhaven now took over that role, with paddle steamers to Dieppe operating from 1947-8 and then from 1853 onwards. A later expansion of the port also saw its railway line extended in 1864 to Seaford. Hopes that Newhaven would become the "Liverpool of the South" were never realised, however.

A number of stations on these LBSCR lines were not in the places we now know them. The original Lewes station was at Friar's Walk, right in the heart of the town (near the top of the pedestrian precinct at the bottom of the town). It was moved to its current location in 1857, but the old station remained in use as a good depot until the 1960s.

The LBSCR's Hastings station was some way to the west of the town on the western edge of St Leonards and was known as Hastings & St Leonards, changing to St Leonards West Marina in 1870. Remarkably, despite the later history of the Hastings stations, which is recounted in Bitter competition - and its benefits, this inconveniently sited station remained in service until 1967.

The original Bishopstone station on the Seaford branch was in the middle of the marshes east of Newhaven, where there was a tide mill until it was destroyed in the Second World War. It was said to produce the lowest revenue of any LBSCR station. It was moved to its present location in 1938 but the platforms of the former station can still be seen.

On the line from Brighton to Portsmouth the original Hove station was nearer to Brighton: it became a goods depot in 1880 and then was known as Holland Road Halt from 1905 to 1956. Today's Hove station was opened in 1865 as Cliftonville, taking its current name in 1895.

Other lost stations include Kingston near the mouth of Shoreham harbour, which closed in 1879, and the original Littlehampton station, which was on the coast line to the north of the town but closed in 1863 when the branch line was built. Bognor likewise had a station just to the west of Barnham until 1864, when a branch line was built to the town. Ford was called Arundel until the current line past the town opened in 1863.

The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway goes on to play a large part in the creation of the lines we use as walkers. For more details see Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor. Meanwhile, Terminus wars details how it came to start services to Victoria station.

© Peter Conway 2010-17 • All Rights Reserved

South East to Dover

The SER offices at London Bridge, 
demolished in 2015

If you look at a map, you can see that there is a railway line that goes directly east from Redhill to Tonbridge and Ashford - a dead straight line that looks as if it is going somewhere in a hurry. This is the line that passes Edenbridge, Penshurst and Leigh on the way to Tonbridge, and such stations as Paddock Wood, Staplehurst, Headcorn and Pluckley between there and Ashford.

While the section between Redhill and Tonbridge might seem like a branch line these days, this was a major trunk route in the first two decades of the railways. It was in fact the original route of the South Eastern Railway, whose aim was to reach the channel port of Dover.

Created by an Act of Parliament in 1836, the South Eastern had initially hoped to extend the London & Greenwich Railway (see Beginnings) to Chatham and Dover - the normal stagecoach route - but the Admiralty blocked this on the grounds that a railway tunnel under the Greenwich Royal Observatory might disturb its instruments. The SER's next plan was for a line a branching off the London & Croydon Railway towards Oxted and Tonbridge. But instead it was forced by parliament to share the route of the London & Brighton Railway, then being planned, as far as Redhill.

Parliament's reasoning was that only one southern route out of the capital was necessary, thus showing a lack of foresight in transport planning it has displayed ever since. The joint route did allow the two companies to share construction costs, but it resulted in an awkward arrangement whereby the London & Brighton owned the track from Croydon to Mertsham, while the SER owned it from there to Redhill. This was later to cause a good deal of conflict - see Bitter Competition - and its benefits.

This indirect route meant the line to Dover was 20 miles longer than the stagecoach route - quite a handicap in the days when trains only travelled at 30 miles per hour. The route explains why Tonbridge station is aligned from east to west, not north to south as one might expect when taking a train to Hastings, and explains why to this day there are trains from London Bridge to Tonbridge via East Croydon and Redhill. It was only in 2009 that this service was transferred from the Southeastern to the Southern franchise.

The energy of those early Victorian railway builders was amazing, and construction started on the entire line from Redhill to Dover all at the same time. Even as they were building the easy straight stretch east from Redhill, they were also tunnelling through the cliffs near Dover.

Remember that this was in the era before mechanical diggers when all railway lines were built with pick and shovel by 'navvies' (an abbreviation of navigator - a term originally used for the labourers who built the canals). These hard working and hard drinking men must have been absolutely terrifying to the rural communities they passed through.

Equally, environmental standards were not what they are today. On the Folkestone to Dover section, where the soft chalk rock was already easy to cut through, the engineers were not above blowing up inconvenient sections of cliff. They did this at a point near where Samphire Hoe is now and simply let the tide wash the rock debris away. As it turned out there was a price to pay for this seafront route, as this section of the line has always been subject to landslips and sea damage. It was closed for that reason from 1915 to 1919 (most inconveniently, as this was the First World War when the railways to the Channel Ports were in heavy use) and also for nine months in 2016.

The line opened to Tonbridge and Ashford in 1842 (the station buildings at Pluckley are the original ones from this era) with Folkestone following in 1843 and Dover in 1844. There were eight trains a day and they took 3 hours 5 minutes to Dover, an average speed of 29.6 miles per hour. The port was then, as now, the most important starting point for cross-channel ferries and this was a time when tourism was developing as rich Victorians discovered the continent.

The SER's station, Dover Town, could not have been more convenient, being right on the dockside (it closed in 1914 and there are now only faint traces of it). The company also built a grand hotel next door - the Lord Warden, which opened in 1853. The following year Admiralty Pier, a new stone jetty, was inaugurated by the government. This enabled cross-channel paddle steamers to dock in Dover at all stages of the tide, when previously passengers had often had to be rowed to shore. By 1860 the SER line was running right onto the pier and travellers could step off its trains straight onto the ship.

The original 1842 station building at Pluckley

But Dover also had a problem in that it was being developed at the time as a naval port, The South Eastern wanted to have a cross-channel port all of its own, where it could operate ferries free from military restrictions. To this end in 1842 it had bought the silted-up harbour of Folkestone, which it proceeded to redevelop and enlarge. (It was an odd choice: nearby Hythe was a much bigger port at the time and the only town of any size between Hastings and Dover, while Folkestone was little more than a fishing village.)

When the railway reached Folkestone in 1843 the company started ferry services from Folkestone to Boulogne, and by 1848 there were two sailings a day, with the first recorded day trip from London to Boulogne taking place in 1849. The first day trip from London to Paris was the following year, with a travel time of ten hours thirty minutes in each direction. By 1854 three times as many cross-channel passengers were using Folkestone as Dover. Helping this was the fact that that Boulogne had a much more direct rail route to Paris than Calais, a situation that did not change until a line was built between the two French towns in 1867.

The original station in Folkestone was some way to the east of the current ones, just before the tunnel. A steep line opened from here down to the harbour in 1844, with a Folkestone Harbour station opening in 1849. The original Folkestone station became Folkestone Junction the following year. For the next 150 years boat trains would chug up the incline, helped by several banking engines in the steam era, and reverse direction onto the main line just beyond the station.

The later history of the Folkestone stations is explained in Bitter competition - and its benefits but Folkestone Junction lived on until 1965 and its platforms can still be seen. Railway involvement in cross-channel ferries was to last until 1984, when British Rail's Sealink subsidiary was sold off by the Thatcher government. Privately-owned ferry services continued to operate out of Folkestone after this date, but they ceased in 2000. The last scheduled trains on the harbour branch ran the following year, though the line was not formally closed until 2015. Both the track and harbour station then remained intact until 2017 but are now being redeveloped, though in a way that looks likely to retain at least some elements of the railway heritage.

The SER line across Folkestone Harbour

Back in the 1840s, once Dover had been reached the South Eastern started building branches. The line was extended from Ashford to Wye, Chilham and Canterbury (the current Canterbury West station) and on to Ramsgate and Margate by 1846. A branch from this line curved off from Minster, just beyond Canterbury, to Sandwich and Deal (in those days still an important port for sailing ships) by 1847 - though it was not till 1881 that this line was extended around to Dover.

On the other side of its territory, the SER struck a line south from Tonbridge (a town then called Tunbridge: the spelling was changed in 1893 to avoid confusion with Tunbridge Wells, which developed as a spa town in the 18th century. Modern pronunciation often incorrectly follows the new spelling). This line reached Tunbridge Wells in 1846, Frant, Wadhurst, Stonegate (then known as Ticehurst Road) and Robertsbridge in 1851, and Battle and Hastings in 1852.

The previous year the line from Ashford to Hastings (the one which serves Rye) had also opened. So this early in the railway boom, Hastings already had lines in three directions, the other one (the first to be opened) being the one to Brighton (see From London Bridge to the sea).

Interestingly, once again the SER did not get its chosen route, which would have struck south from Headcorn to Tenterden and on to Hastings from there. The justification here was that Tenterden was one of the largest towns in Kent at the time. The company was to have another attempt at this route when they opened a Paddock Wood to Hawkhurst line in 1883. This did not get to Tenterden either, and it was not until 1900 that the town was reached via Robertsbridge by the Kent & East Sussex Railway (see Lines we lost for more on these routes). It is for this reason that Tenterden is today a relatively quiet leafy town.

Incidentally, in another example of Victorian railway contractors cutting corners in order to build quickly, on the line from Tunbridge Wells to Hasting the builder saved money by lining the tunnel with three layers of bricks rather than the seven specified. By the time this was discovered it was too late to do much about it except add the extra four layers on top.

This meant the tunnels on this route were narrower than all other English rail tunnels, and so for about a century slightly smaller trains had to be specially designed for the Hastings line. In the modern era this became impractical and so all tunnels on this very hilly route are now single track. This explains why any delay on the Hastings line is quickly magnified into a major problem and why services on it are not particularly fast.

Very early on, in 1844, the South Eastern had also opened a line that today seems like a rather quaint little branch line but originally had an important purpose. It ran from Paddock Wood via Yalding, Wateringbury and East Farleigh to Maidstone (now Maidstone West), forming that town’s only railway link for the next 30 years. The name Paddock Wood dates from this time - the station had been named Maidstone Road, ie the nearest stop to Maidstone, when the Redhill to Ashford line opened in 1842. It was in the middle of nowhere and the town we see today grew up around it. In 1856 the line was extended from Maidstone to Strood (a station at that time named Rochester), passing Snodland and Cuxton.

The SER had already approached Strood from another angle, having absorbed the London & Greenwich Railway (see Beginnings) in 1845. (Technically it just leased its lines, and the company remained in existence, collecting the rent, until 1923.) The hills around Greenwich blocked further progress however, and so instead a line (the North Kent Line) was opened from a junction near London Bridge to Lewisham, Dartford, Gravesend and Strood in 1849. Greenwich remained a terminus until 1878, when the Admiralty finally relented and let the SER build the Maze Hill tunnel linking it to Woolwich and beyond.

One other useful line for walkers that we owe to the South Eastern Railway is the one that goes to Dorking and Gomshall. Opened in 1849 as the nominally independent Reading, Guildford & Reigate Railway, it was in fact always operated by the SER and was bought by them in 1852. Its aim was to provide a link between the Great Western Railway and the Channel Ports. In the 1850s the SER ran through trains from London to Reading on the route, via Redhill, Guildford, Farnborough, Sandhurst and Wokingham, which must have ranked as one of the more indirect rail routes in the south east. Right into the 1960s special summer holiday trains continued to run by this route to the resort towns of the south coast, and today the line fulfils a similar role by providing a link between Great Western services to Reading and flights out of Gatwick.

Incidentally, the station now known as Dorking West on this line was the original Dorking station: the one now known as Dorking Deepdene was added in 1851 under the name of Box Hill. Later, in 1867, the line from Leatherhead to Dorking was built (see Lines we lost), and the current Box Hill station was opened, known for much of its life as Box Hill and Burford Bridge. For the next 56 years, therefore, there were two Box Hill stations, until in 1923 the newly-created Southern Railways renamed the original one to avoid confusion.

There were also two stations named Dorking throughout this period (the original one and one on the Leatherhead line). Again it was Southern in 1923 that decided to distinguish between them. It named the original station Dorking Town, and the Leatherhead line one Dorking North. In 1968 British Rail renamed Dorking North as plain Dorking (the name it still has today), while Dorking Town became Dorking West in 1987.

© Peter Conway 2010-19 • All Rights Reserved

Bitter competition – and its benefits

Have you ever wondered why there are two ways to get by rail from London to Sevenoaks, Ashford, Canterbury and Dover? The answer lies in bitter competition between the Victorian railway companies - and two in particular who competed for traffic in Kent.

The crest of 'The Chatham'
on Blackfriars Bridge

The early railway companies were profit-making businesses with no state support - something that was almost unique to the UK. In other European countries governments tended to decide what railway lines should be built, and while private capital may have financed them, the state often provided revenue guarantees. In the UK railways needed the permission of parliament, but it was given by private bills on a case by case basis. Whether a railway was approved or not depended not on any overall government plan, but on the whim of MPs (who would have included key landowners with interest in the outcome).

Despite this, Victorian railway companies often managed to establish control over their own particular area of the country. On the edges of their territory they might compete with rivals, but within them they had a monopoly. A good example is the the London, Brighton & South Coast, which occupied a triangle south from London, spreading out to Portsmouth one way and Hastings in the other (see From London Bridge to the sea).

Two large ceramic maps of the lines it ultimately built in this triangle are still to be found on the wall in Victoria station in the passageway down the side of Marks & Spencers. (The map nearer the concourse shows the longer distance lines: another near the station exit shows the suburban ones: see Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor for photos of the long distance map). Though some lines have since closed, this remains the territory of the Southern franchise to this day.

The South Eastern Railway might have expected to similarly dominate the lines from London to Kent, especially after its rapid route building in the 1840s (see South East to Dover), but in 1859 it got a rude shock. In 1850 the East Kent Railway had been formed, initially to build a branch from Strood to Rochester, Chatham and Canterbury for which it got parliamentary permission in 1853. Leave to extend the line to Dover was added in 1855. The line opened from Strood to Faversham in 1858, and the East Kent applied for running rights over the SER's line from Strood to London Bridge via Lewisham.

This the SER refused on the grounds that it would create a shorter route from Dover, Canterbury and the Medway Towns to London than via its own main line through Redhill. It was also peeved that its plans for a similar route had been refused by parliament in 1847, and thought - with some justification - that its new rival did not have the finance to build the lines it planned.

But the East Kent was not to be put off so easily. In 1859 it renamed itself the London, Chatham & Dover Railway and set about living up to its name. It extended its lines from Faversham to Canterbury (now Canterbury East) in 1860, and in the same year opened its own line from Rochester to St Mary Cray near Bromley. (This is the line that goes through Sole Street, though this station - incidentally, the highest point on the line - did not open till 1861).

Through a series of alliances with small railways in London - mainly the West End of London & Crystal Palace Railway (see Terminus wars) - the LCDR then got access to the new Victoria station in 1861. In the same year, it extended its lines from Canterbury to Dover and from Faversham to Whitstable, with Herne Bay following in 1861 and Margate and Ramsgate in 1863.

The South Eastern Railway now had a rival with a shorter route from London to many of its key markets - not to mention a terminus in the heart of the fashionable new suburbs of the West End. Needless to say 'The Chatham' (as it became known) lost no time in offering ferry services from Dover to Calais to compete with the cross-channel routes of the SER. It even opened a line in 1862 from Swanley to Sevenoaks, crossing the lovely viaduct you see as you walk into Eynsford.

The SER’s answer was a hugely expensive new line through the North Downs from Orpington to Sevenoaks, and on through the Greensand Ridge to Tonbridge (the latter tunnel the longest in England at the time, at nearly two miles). This link opened in May 1868 and is now the main line. The works for the line included building a new, larger Tonbridge station on the other side of the road. The entrance gates of the original station, to the east of the road bridge, are apparently still visible.

By this time the SER had had the satisfaction of seeing its over-ambitious rival go bankrupt as a result of the failure of finance house Overend Gurney in 1866 (the last bank collapse in the UK until the run on Northern Rock in 2007: Overend Gurney had invested too much in the railway mania of the early 1860s). The failure also affected the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (see A miraculous survivor for the reasons) but both it and the Chatham recovered, and the stage was then set for 30 years of bitter competition between the Chatham and the SER that led to a heavy duplication of lines from which we still benefit.

It was not only Canterbury, Sevenoaks and Dover that had two stations (the Chatham station in Sevenoaks is the one now called Bat & Ball, incidentally). The Chatham also extended their Sevenoaks line from Otford to Maidstone East in 1874, and to Ashford in 1884. This route made the SER branch line from Paddock Wood to Maidstone somewhat redundant and yet it survives to this day. So do two different ways to get to Canterbury, Dover, Ashford, Maidstone, Sevenoaks and even Bromley (Bromley North being the other one).

The rivalry was fuelled by the SER’s chairman, Sir Edward Watkins. One of the giants of the Victorian railway, he had visions of linking the north of England with Paris via a Channel tunnel, and he had the means to do it, as he was also chairman of the Metropolitan Railway (the first underground line in London, opened in 1863 - see London's Victorian railways) and responsible for building what became the Great Central route from the Midlands to London Marylebone in the 1890s (see Thames and Chilterns). In 1881 he even started building his Channel tunnel, which advanced a mile or so out to sea, but in the end was blocked by politics and money problems.

His opposite number at the London, Chatham & Dover was James Forbes, who was also in charge of the Metropolitan District Railway (now the District Line on the underground), a rival of the Metropolitan. Even though the two companies created the Circle Line (which opened in 1884), the Metropolitan ran the clockwise trains and the District the anti-clockwise ones, and there was little cooperation between them. They had separate ticket offices at each Circle Line station and were not above encouraging passengers to go the long way round so as to use their trains.

Relations between the SER and the Chatham were just as petty and led to both companies - but especially the Chatham - becoming impoverished. Both were a byword for poor service and old carriages in the Victorian era (see The golden age of the railways).

The former Dover Harbour station

One example of their squabbling was on cross-channel routes. The SER had reached Dover first in 1844 and had developed Folkestone as a port from 1843 on onwards (see South East to Dover). Its Dover Town station was right at the head of Admiralty Pier, the new stone jetty from which cross-channel ferries went, and it had built a grand hotel there, the Lord Warden. But in 1853 it was disappointed not to get the contract to carry UK mail across the channel - it went to a local firm instead - and even more annoyed when the Chatham arrived in 1861 and built its Dover Harbour station a stone's throw from Dover Town.

Worse was to come when the mail contract was re-tendered in 1863 and won by the LCDR. The Chatham also got permission to run its lines onto Admiralty Pier, as the SER had been able to do since 1861 (though the two companies had separate platforms). The SER's response to this new competition was to propose a truce and a sharing of all cross-channel and London to Dover receipts according to a fixed formula. The Chatham - by this time financially overstretched - agreed.

Peace between the two companies never lasted long, however, and before the ink was dry on the agreement the SER was already plotting to circumvent it. In 1863 it opened a station to the west of Folkestone - Shorncliffe Camp, ostensibly aimed at serving an army barracks (still there and now the home of the Ghurkas) but in reality a way to get around the revenue-sharing deal. The SER would decant passengers at Shorncliffe, take them by road to Folkestone harbour, and claim that they were outside the agreement. The Chatham sued them on this point and eventually won.

Folkestone nevertheless remained the most important cross-channel port for the SER, and the LCDR was keen to get access to it, and so in the 1880s it proposed to parliament a line from Canterbury to Folkestone via the Alkham Valley. The SER countered with its own scheme, the Elham Valley line, which won the day and opened in 1887, joining the main line at Shorncliffe.

To win over public opinion in Folkestone to their proposal the SER offered to build a new station between Shorncliffe and Folkestone Junction. This opened in 1884 as Cheriton Arch, changing its name to Radnor Park in 1886. It became the most popular station for the town and in 1895 was named Folkestone Central. Though the Elham Valley line closed in 1947, Shorncliffe also survives, renamed Folkestone West in 1962.

Later in the century both companies also tried to develop new cross-channel ports on the North Kent coast to get around the revenue-sharing agreement - Queenborough for the Chatham and Port Victoria for the SER - but both failed to attract much business. They did cooperate on one line, however – the link between Dover and Deal, which opened in 1881. The line joining the two companies systems at Dover - the Hawkesbury Street Curve - dates from this era and is now the main line from Folkestone into Dover. Trains come in along the top of the beach, then lurch inland on the curve, passing the remains of Dover Harbour station, which closed in 1927. You then go through a tunnel into Dover Priory, originally a Chatham station.

Eventually the companies came to realise that their fierce competition was doing neither of them any good. A bill to unite not just these two companies but also the London & South Western Railway and the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway had been passed by parliament as early as 1868, but the deal fell apart because of a disagreement over rates. But in 1899 the SER and Chatham did agree to a joint management committee - the South Eastern and Chatham Companies’ Managing Committee, or the South Eastern & Chatham for short. This was not quite a merger – the two companies remained financially independent of each other – but was almost the same thing.

This alliance has consequences to this day. The two companies agreed to recognise each others tickets and routes, and it is for this reason that a return ticket to Yalding is valid for return from Borough Green. In Bickley, just east of Bromley, they built a connection between their two networks and this is still regularly used during engineering works, for example to run Charing Cross services out of Victoria.

Otherwise, the main legacy of the rivalry is the wonderful multiplicity of routes across Kent – all now in the Southeastern franchise. Thankfully the duplication of stations has for the most part gone. In Maidstone, Canterbury and Bromley there are still two stations, but in many other places - Sevenoaks, Ashford, Rochester, Chatham, Gravesend, Whitstable, Dover, Margate and Ramsgate – they were merged. At Dover docks the two companies cooperated to build Dover Marine station on Admiralty Pier which opened for military traffic in 1915 and for civilians in 1918. It was the station for boat trains until the Channel Tunnel made it redundant in 1994, but still survives, no longer connected to the rail network, as a cruise ship terminal.

Incidentally, the Chatham and the South Eastern were not the only two companies to enjoy bad relations with each other. The South Eastern and the London, Brighton & South Coast also squabbled incessantly at the points where they came into contact. One was in Hastings, which the LBSCR had been the first to reach in 1846, but only via a station to the west of the town of St Leonards and so some way from Hastings itself.

The interior of Dover Marine station today

The company had wanted to carry on to Ashford, but in fact it was the South Eastern that eventually ended up building this line, starting from Bo Beep Junction (named after a pub popular with shepherds and still so called) just south of West St Leonards station and carrying on through the current St Leonards Warrior Square and Hastings stations by 1852.

The LBSCR had running rights along this line to Hastings, but until the SER opened its Sevenoaks shortcut in 1868 the LBSCR had the shorter route to London (76.5 miles via Lewes, as opposed to the SER's 93 miles via Tonbridge and Redhill). So the SER resorted to childish tactics such as blocking LBSCR trains in or even removing tracks overnight so they could not use the line. It was not until 1870 that they let LBSCR trains stop at St Leonards Warrior Square. To this day the former LBSCR line passes within a few dozen metres of West St Leonards without having any access to that station.

Another point of friction between the SER and LBSCR was East Croydon, where the LBSCR for a time in the 1860s tried to create its own separate station, and the two companies also squabbled over who should operate a line from Purley just south of Croydon to Caterham, which had been opened by an independent company in 1856 and gone bust three years later. The SER eventually won the battle but had its trains obstructed by the LBSCR at every opportunity.

Perhaps the most notorious flashpoint was at Redhill, however, where the SER’s original line to Dover started (see From London Bridge to the Sea and South East to Dover). The SER and the London, Brighton & South Coast shared the line from East Croydon to Redhill, but ownership was split, with the LBSCR owning the part from Croydon to Mertsham and the SER the section from Mertsham to Redhill. There was much argument about whose trains had priority, and finally in 1899 the LBSCR built a line bypassing this whole section of track, which is known as the Quarry Line. To this day this allows fast trains to Brighton to bypass Coulsdon South, Merstham and Redhill, and is very useful during engineering works.

© Peter Conway 2010-25 • All Rights Reserved

A more rational railway

The Waterloo station we see today
dates from 1922

The rivalry between the South Eastern and Chatham (see Bitter competition – and its benefits) gave us lots of alternative routes, but many of them are rather indirect and slow. So what might a more rational railway network look like?

For an example one only has to look to the London & South Western Railway – today’s South West Trains franchise. Its network is much more logical, proceeding directly south west to Woking, and splitting into Southampton and Portsmouth branches there. The Salisbury and Exeter branch then splits off from the Southampton line at Basingstoke.

The company's original name was the Southampton, London and Branch Railway and Dock Company and its initial aim was to link the emerging port of Southampton to London (a canal having originally been proposed). Southampton was in those days a less important port than Portsmouth, which was Britain's main naval base and easier to access in the days of sail. But once steamships were developed which could navigate Southampton Water without problems, the double tides of Southampton became more attractive.

This focus on freight governed the company's choice of its initial terminus - Nine Elms, near Vauxhall station today, which was a good place to tranship cargo to and from the River Thames. In 1848 it moved to Waterloo, however (though the present station dates from 1922: see Terminus wars). Nine Elms remained as a goods station until 1968.

The London & South Western also had ambitions to drive a line to Bristol and that was why it chose a northerly route through Woking and Basingstoke (the one just a village and the other a small town before the coming of the railways), rather than the more obvious route via Guildford, Farnham and Alton - a route with larger intermediate towns and richer farmland, which is the way an early 19th century road traveller would have gone.

In the event, before the Bristol line could get off the drawing board the Great Western Railway had proposed its more direct route to Bristol - the one we are all familiar with now - so that part of the plan was never realised. It was the GWR who in 1856 ended up building the line from Salisbury to Bath and that was broad gauge, so through trains from the LSWR system were not possible.

The LSWR was a bit slower to start construction than other early railways. It was created in 1830, but took till 1834 to start work its line and did not open (from Nine Elms to Winchfield) until 1838, with Basingstoke and Winchester following in 1839 and Southampton in 1840. The line was well built because on opening the journey to Southampton could be done in 1 hour 50 minutes - an average speed of 42.9 miles per hour and not so far adrift from times today.

The company's station in Southampton was right down by the docks, a location that was convenient both for ship passengers and freight. The grand Imperial Hotel was incorporated into it (later the South Western Hotel). Many passengers on the Titanic supposedly stayed there the night before she sailed.

Portsmouth was inevitably another early target of the company but its approach was a rather indirect one - a branch line from Eastleigh (then Bishopstoke) to Gosport on the opposite side of the harbour to Portsmouth, which opened in 1841. This route required passengers to take a ferry into Portsmouth and there was an obvious opportunity for another company to offer a through rail connection. This happened in 1847 when the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway reached Portsmouth via the south coast from Brighton (see From London Bridge to the Sea).

The following year the LSWR retaliated with a line around the top of Portsmouth Harbour, passing through Fareham. This made the Gosport line redundant and it closed in 1853. (A writer in 1960 commented that as a result "Gosport was left with the doubtful distinction of being the largest town in England without a passenger railway service". Within a few years due to the Beeching Cuts it was to have lots of competition for that honour.)

These two routes remained the main lines into Portsmouth right into the twentieth century. The current line to Portsmouth via Guildford was a rural branch line, with steep gradients around Haslemere that made it slow going for steam trains. It opened in stages - Woking to Guildford in 1845, with Godalming following in 1849 (the original station being to the north of the current one: it lasted till 1897 and then became a goods depot till closure in 1961). Not until 1858 was the hilly section past Haslemere and Petersfield to Havant added.

Right into the 1930s this line only had a few services a day, and so eyebrows were raised when Southern Railways decided to electrify it in 1937 (see The sparks effect). The company had realised that electric trains would make short work of the gradients, however, and that proved to be the case. The "Portsmouth Electric" swiftly became the main route to the port city.

Another early line of the London & South Western was to Salisbury, opened in 1847. But this was a line from Eastleigh, running north through Romsey. Due to its junction layout it could only be approached from the south, so through trains from London were not possible. The direct line we now have from Basingstoke opened as far as Overton, Whitchurch and Andover in 1854, getting to Salisbury in 1857.

In the meantime the company had been pushing west from Southampton, opening a line from there to Dorchester in 1848. This bypassed the original Southampton station, with a Southampton West End station opening on the new line. To avoid confusion, the original Southampton station became Southampton Docks in 1858, then Southampton Town for Docks in 1896. In the previous year an expanded Southampton West had been opened which became the town's main station, renamed Southampton Central in 1895. Incidentally until 1927 this station was right on the seafront: reclamation of West Bay, on which it stood, to create Southampton Western Docks, the current container port, took place from 1927 to 1934.

The original Southampton station - known as Southampton Terminus after 1923 - remained important for ocean liner traffic, though boat trains for ship passengers tended to run right onto the dockside, where many shipping companies had their own stations. By the 1900s passenger services were increasingly focused on Southampton West, with Terminus having trains to Reading, Alton, Portsmouth and (via a Great Western Railway line) to Newbury and Didcot. It was left out of electrification plans (see The sparks effect) in the early 1960s, however, and so despite being described in 1961 as "one of the glories of British station architecture", it closed in 1966. Its buildings survive, however, including the former South Western Hotel whose name is still visible. Part of the station's goods shed canopy is used as a covered car park. The site also still has a railway line running past it and there has been some talk of reopening it as a local station.

Back in 1848, the line to Dorchester pressed on west from Southampton, passing through Brockenhurst and Ringwood. It went nowhere near Bournemouth because it was just an insignificant village. It was not until 1862 that a line was built south from Ringwood to Christchurch on the coast. In 1870 this line was extended to Bournemouth, which was starting to attract attention as a seaside resort.

The former goods shed at Southampton Terminus

In 1848 a branch had also been opened from the Southampton and Dorchester line to approach Poole from the west down the west side of Holes Bay. But like the Gosport approach to Portsmouth this required a ferry crossing to get to the town. In 1872 a line was built across Holes Bay to the centre of Poole. In 1874 this was extended to a new six platform Bournemouth terminus - Bournemouth West - with the original Bournemouth station becoming Bournemouth East. As well as LSWR trains, holiday services from the Midlands and North would terminate at Bournemouth West, having used the Somerset & Dorset line from Bath and Bristol. This traffic was important to the growth of the town as a resort.

In 1885 a new Bournemouth East was opened a little to the west of the former station, and a link was built between it and the Bournemouth West terminus. In 1888 a new main line along the coast, the one we use today, opened from Brockenhurst to Christchurch via Sway and New Milton. Bournemouth East station was renamed Bournemouth Central in 1899.

Bournemouth West continued to be the main station, however - closer to the town centre than Central. It did, however, suffer from the disadvantage that it was a terminus, while Central was a through station. It was for this reason, as well as the closure of the Somerset & Dorset in the Beeching cuts, that Bournemouth West was closed in 1965, leaving Bournemouth Central as the main station, though somewhat far from seafront. The original inland line via Ringwood, which became a branch line when the coastal route was opened in 1888, also closed at this time.

Other lines opened by the London & South Western include the one from Dorchester to Weymouth in 1865, and the line from Brockenhurst to Lymington in 1858. It was only in 1884 that the latter line was extended to Lymington Harbour, making this the route to the Isle of Wight it is today. From Woking a line was built to Farnham and Alton in 1852 and this was extended to Winchester in 1865: this latter section closed in 1973 - see Lines we lost.

Westward expansion from Salisbury started in 1859, with a line reaching Yeovil that year and Exeter in 1860. This was just the start of a long foray into the west of England. The LSWR had purchased the Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway on the north coast of Cornwall as early as 1846, but didn’t manage to connect it to its network until 1899, via a line through the remoter parts of north Cornwall.

Apart from the summer holiday months, when the LSWR could run the grandly named Atlantic Coast Express along it, this line never made money. It became known as "the withered arm” and to nobody's great surprise closed in 1966.

© Peter Conway 2010-17 • All Rights Reserved

Terminus wars

The original London, Chatham & Dover station
at Blackfriars was on the south side of the river

Those living to the south of London are often lucky enough to have two different ways into London by rail. From Brighton or East Croydon you can travel to Victoria or London Bridge, and from Otford you can get services to Victoria or Blackfriars. On some routes the terminus is different on working days or Sundays, or in peak hours and off-peak hours.

Sometimes this choice is due to the competition between two rival rail companies in the 19th century (see Bitter competition - and its benefits), but it also reflects a desire by the Victorian railway companies to serve both the City of London and the West End, the businessman and the leisure traveller.

For the first twenty or so years of the railway era there was no such choice. For destinations in Kent, Sussex or Surrey you would have travelled from London Bridge, which was terminus of both the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway and the South Eastern Railway – a role it still fulfils to this day, with services now provided by the Southern/Thameslink and Southeastern franchises. The only other terminus for trains to the south of London was Waterloo, which had opened in 1848, replacing Nine Elms as the head station for the London & South Western Railway.

Both stations were at the time right on the edge of London, as were Euston (opened 1837), Paddington (1838), and Kings Cross (1852). The reason for this was that Parliament prohibited railways from coming into the city (even the Metropolitan Line, the first underground line, opened in 1863, had to obey this rule, skirting around what were in those days the boundaries of London). They were also not allowed to cross the River Thames.

This rule weakened when Victoria station opened in 1860. The story of this station starts with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first trade fair, which saw the Crystal Palace built in Hyde Park. When the exhibition ended, the palace was moved to a hilltop near Sydenham in South London - the area which bears its name to this day. There it remained a popular entertainments venue until 1936, when it burnt down in a fire.

Large scale events were held in the Crystal Palace: it attracted well over a million visitors each year, and in 1883 one event had 4,000 singers and as many orchestra players. So it made sense to use the new technology of railways to transport people to it. The result was the West of London & Crystal Palace Railway, which was opened in 1856 between Battersea Wharf (near the southern end of Chelsea Bridge: the station was misleadingly named Pimlico) and the current Crystal Palace station, calling en route at Wandsworth Common, Balham, Streatham Hill, West Norwood and Gipsy Hill. Two years later the line was extended to Beckenham Junction and Bromley (now Bromley South).

It was obvious that Battersea Wharf was not an ideal terminus, however, and several railway companies soon cooperated to build a line across the river. When this opened, in 1860, Victoria station was born. It became a second terminus for the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (who had originally asked to share the London & South Western Railway's lines into Waterloo but had been rebuffed). They drove south from Balham to link up with their existing London Bridge to Brighton main line at East Croydon.

The London, Chatham & Dover Railway also used the West End of London lines to link its network to Victoria (see Bitter competition - and its benefits), building a station next door to the London & Brighton one, which opened in 1861. But in 1862-3 it built its own direct line to Victoria through Herne Hill and Brixton - the main line route to this day - and ceased to use the The West End of London lines, which were eventually sold to the London, Brighton & South Coast. This new direct line had to cross the main line out of Waterloo and originally went under them on a rather complicated route with steep gradients. This proved unsatisfactory and the current viaduct over the Waterloo main line was opened in 1867: amazingly as you cross it today the original line can still be seen below.

The LCDR shared its station at Victoria with the Great Western Railway, which from 1863 to 1915 ran trains onto its system via Clapham Junction and the West London Line (not the same as the West End of London line mentioned above, but the line that links Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction and is now used by the Overground).

Though side by side, the two stations at Victoria - LBSCR and LCDR - remained quite separate until 1924, a year after both companies were absorbed into Southern Railways (see The golden age of the railways), which is when the current archway between the two halves was created. You can see if you look at the facade of Victoria today that the architecture on either side is very different, and bizarrely the main electronic departure board at the station still lists “Chatham-side” trains in chronological order and then “Brighton-side” ones. The two sides had separate ticket offices right into the 1960s, and railway staff are still heard to refer to “Kent-side” and “Sussex-side” departures. The recently restored roof on the Chatham side, incidentally, is the original one from 1862, now a listed structure.

The opening of Victoria meant that the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway could serve both the City and the West End, but even more of a worry for the South Eastern Railway was that its rival, the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, could run boat trains for the Channel ports right from the doorstep of the wealthy West End customers most likely to use them.

What made this even more annoying was that two earlier attempts by the SER - to extend its lines closer to the West End - essentially to where Waterloo East station is today - had been rejected by parliament: the earliest such proposal had been in 1845. But now the company got the permission it needed and started to create a through station at London Bridge.

Southeastern kept four terminus platforms at London Bridge, however, and right up until the early 1970s there were three parts to the station - the "high level" through platforms to Charing Cross and Cannon Street, the "low level" former South Eastern terminus platforms (under an arched roof), and the grander London, Brighton and South Coast terminus (under a separate arched roof). In all the two stations had 23 platforms.

It was not until 1928 that a gap in the wall was made between the SER and LBSCR stations (then newly united under Southern Railways), but connections between the two remained awkward and impractical. Eventually after considerable Second World War damage the SER side was modernised from 1972 onwards, removing its arched roof. The LBSCR's Victorian roof remained intact until 2013, however, when it was dismantled as part of the current rebuild of the station. Due to be finished in 2018, this is adding three new through lines to the station in order to create space for Thameslink trains.

From its new through platforms the SER extended its lines westwards and then across the river to Charing Cross, opened in 1864. This enabled it not just to serve both City and West End, but to do so with the same train - something no other line can do to this day. But by this time the London, Chatham & Dover was already encroaching further into its territory by opening Blackfriars station (see below). To counter that, the SER built a spur from its Charing Cross line over the river to a new City terminus at Cannon Street, opened in 1866.

Right up until 1916 long distance trains to Ramsgate, Folkestone or Hastings served both stations - that is, they started at Charing Cross, were shunted to Cannon Street, and went on from there to their destination via London Bridge. This awkward arrangement was one reason why the SER was notorious for bad timekeeping. There was also a regular Charing Cross to Cannon Street shuttle which was a popular way to travel between the City and West End until the District Line was opened to Mansion House in 1871. The track link allowing trains to run from Charing Cross to Cannon Street still exists and is occasionally used during engineering works.

The route from London Bridge to Charing Cross was always a bottleneck, however, with the SER only able to get permission to run two tracks across Borough Market, instead of the four it had elsewhere on the spur. The market (London’s original fruit and vegetable market, predating Covent Garden by centuries) was able to resist further expansion by referring to its 1550 royal charter and by a 1754 Act of Parliament that forbids it to use its property for any purpose other than a market. These ancient rights even blocked an attempted compulsory purchase order initiated by British Rail as it prepared for the launch of Thameslink services over the route in 1988. Only in the first decade of the new century has the impasse been resolved and a new viaduct threaded through the market as part of the Thameslink 2000 project.

Today a basic commuter station that is busy only during rush hours, Cannon Street was originally an impressive terminus, with a fine arched roof and a grand hotel similar to the one that still exists at Charing Cross. The City Terminus Hotel, as it was called, was a popular place for business meetings and had a first floor ballroom that could seat 1000. The building was turned into offices in 1931 - in the 1950s my uncle remembers working in an office carved out of the former ballroom, with mirrors still in place on the walls - but was demolished in 1963. The arched roof of the station, damaged by World War II bombs, was dismantled in 1958, giving the riverside towers that once supported it a rather odd look today.

The arched roof at Charing Cross met a more notorious fate. At 3.30pm on 5 December 1905 a loud crack was heard and it was noticed that one of the main roof girders had come loose. The station was evacuated and 15 minutes later the whole roof came down, killing five workmen and a bookstore vendor, and demolishing part of a neighbouring theatre. The roof was replaced with a more basic ridge and furrow roof, which lasted until the Embankment Place office building was built over the station in the late 1980s.

More sturdy construction went into Hungerford Bridge - the bridge crossing the river to Charing Cross, which now has the Golden Jubilee footbridges either side. Take a look at it the next time you cross the river (or see the photo in The sparks effect). A sturdy, if workaday, piece of Victorian engineering, it has withstood the constant pounding of heavy trains for nearly 150 years without complaint. The brick piers of this bridge originally carried a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which is why there is a footway today. The chains of the demolished suspension bridge were used to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

With the SER now able to reach both the West End and City, the London & South Western Railway looked for a way to do the same. It had always planned to extend its lines into the City (which is one reason why the station concourse at Waterloo is elevated above ground level and the lines out of it are carried on arches), and it now built a bridge across the road to the South Eastern lines at Waterloo East (originally Waterloo Junction), getting permission from the SER to run its trains by this route into Cannon Street.

But the two companies were continually squabbling over whose trains had priority and the link was not much used. The disused railway bridge for this link is still there, spanning Waterloo Road and now used as a storage space. The ghost of it lives on, perhaps, in the fact that tickets to 'London Terminals' are not swallowed up by Waterloo's automatic ticket barriers, as they are at other London terminals such as Victoria, and can be used for onward travel from Waterloo East to Cannon Street or London Bridge.

The link to Waterloo East was not just disfunctional - it also split Waterloo into two and made it a disjointed station, with clusters of platforms in various locations. It was widely regarded as the most confusing of the London termini by the Victorians, and was memorably lampooned for this in Jerome K Jerome's comic novel Three Men in a Boat. In the end, in 1898, the company built what is now the Waterloo & City Line to give it access to the City. This was later operated by British Rail and only transferred to the London Underground network in 1994. Shortly afterwards the LSWR embarked on a monumental rebuilding of Waterloo which took from 1900 to 1922 and gave us the magnificent station we have today.

As mentioned above, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened its City link in 1864, building a line north from Herne Hill to Blackfriars. This line was of key importance to the company in the late Victorian era, capturing business travel from London to the Continent. Stones from the facade of an earlier incarnation of the station, still preserved on its main concourse, show all the destinations that could be reached from it in its heyday - not just Margate, Ramsgate and Canterbury, but also Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Dresden, Florence – and even St Petersburg (see photo below). All of these were reached via the LCDR’s lines to Dover and their express ferries to Calais. A portion of all LCDR main line trains – to Dover and other places on its network – started on the Blackfriars spur, and were joined to Victoria services at Herne Hill.

Some of the places the LCDR served
via the Blackfriars branch

The station itself has a complicated history. The original Blackfriars station opened on the south side of the river in 1864 under the name Blackfriars Bridge. There is a fine picture of it (see top of page) in the pedestrian subway that carries the Thames Path under Blackfriars Road. Some remains of it – a brick structure with arches – can also be seen just a little way to the south down Blackfriars Road, on the left before the intersection with Southwark Street.

The company soon built a line across the river, however, and opened a Ludgate Hill station (near where City Thameslink is now) in 1865. Beyond this the line linked up via a tunnel at Snow Hill to the new Metropolitan Line at Farringdon, which had opened in 1863. This created a north-south link across London and was much in demand for both passenger and freight services. Over a century before Thameslink, passenger trains that went via this route in the 1870s included ones from Brixton to Wood Green and Greenwich to Enfield. The London & South Western Railway even ran trains from Wimbledon, Richmond and Kingston into Ludgate Hill, using LCDR lines from Clapham Junction. (For more on this see London's Victorian railways.)

All this traffic meant Ludgate Hill became very congested, and so to ease the problem the LCDR created a branch line to a new terminus at Holborn Viaduct, opened in 1874. It also built a tunnel (now disused) under Smithfield market to run trains into the Metropolitan Line terminus of Moorgate. As if that was not complicated enough, in 1885 the company built another railway bridge across the river (the one in use today) and opened a station on its north side – the current Blackfriars, but known as St Pauls until 1937. This was only a stone’s throw from Ludgate Hill, but both stations continued to operate until 1929, when Ludgate Hill was closed.

The next act in this saga came when freight traffic declined in the 1960s, leading to the original 1864 railway bridge being closed in 1971 and part demolished in 1985. Its red pillars still remain, however, and on the one at the southern end of the bridge you can still see the proud crest of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, now beautifully repainted (see photo on Bitter Competition page)

(Incidentally, you might think this crest looks rather magnificent, but eminent Victoria art critic John Ruskin disagreed: “The entire invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and conveying the information upon it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway,” he fulminated.)

The Snow Hill tunnel linking north and south also fell victim to the fall in freight traffic: it had ceased to carry passenger services in 1916, and when goods traffic ended in 1971 it became completely disused and the tracks were removed. It proved only to be a temporary closure, however, as the tunnel was reopened in 1988 to create Thameslink passenger services.

Thameslink made Holborn Viaduct station redundant, and it closed in 1990. This proud Victorian terminus, with six platforms, continental boat train services to Dover and a grand hotel, was heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War and never recovered. Its buildings were replaced in 1963 by an office block, and in 1967 the train shed roof was removed. In its later years the station was a sad place - three platforms with minimal shelter from the elements, served by a few peak hour commuter trains. Yet in a way it was only transformed and not removed, as its former site is now the northern entrance to City Thameslink station.

Finally from 2008 to 2011 Blackfriars station was entirely rebuilt to cope with increased Thameslink traffic and allow for longer twelve carriage trains. To create space for these, the platforms were extended right across the bridge under a striking new roof of solar panels, and a new entrance to the station was built at the bridge's southern end. So now for the first time since October 1885, when the original Blackfriars Bridge station closed (to passengers: it remained a goods station until 1964), you can access this line from the south side of the river as well as the north.

The South Eastern Railway also had a Blackfriars station, which was situated on its line between London Bridge and Waterloo East, about 400 metres to the south of Blackfriars Bridge. This only lasted four years – from 1864 to 1868 – until Waterloo Junction (now Waterloo East: see above) opened to replace it, but is worth mentioning because its name is still clearly visible under the railway bridge across the road from Southwark tube station (see photo on Introduction page: the Charing Cross Railway named in the photo was the company created to raise money for the extension, which was taken over by South Eastern once the line opened).

For a walk taking in all the main London terminus stations, click here.

© Peter Conway 2010-20 • All Rights Reserved

Thames and Chilterns

First time travellers on the branch line from Maidenhead to Marlow are often surprised when the train reverses direction at Bourne End. It is easy to assume that you have somehow missed your stop and that the train is now heading back to Maidenhead. But no, the train soon curves away to the west and across the floodplains of the Thames towards Marlow.

A detail of the canopy at Paddington

Why does the train reverse direction in this way? The answer is that the line to Bourne End once went on to High Wycombe, and Marlow was just a branch line off it. This line was in fact only the second line to be built up into Chiltern Hills - the first being the London to Birmingham line that passed through Berkhamsted and Tring in 1838 (see Beginnings). When the Maidenhead to High Wycombe line was built, there were no Chiltern lines out of Marylebone and no Metropolitan Line out of Baker Street. It was to be thirty years before the High Wycombe line had any competition.

The Wycombe Railway opened in 1854, nominally as an independent company, but with the intention of being taken over by the Great Western Railway, as indeed happened in 1867. It was one of several branch lines off the GWR's main line out of Paddington: the one to Henley opened three years later. The Wycombe line ran via Cookham and was built in single track, in classic branch line style, as it remains to this day.

High Wycombe was not the terminus for long. In 1862 the line was extended to Princes Risborough, becoming the first railway to reach that town. There was an intermediate station at West Wycombe - near the famous caves - which closed in 1958, but no station at Saunderton until 1901. Barely had this opened when in 1913 it was burnt down by suffragettes, one of several similar attacks.

Once past Princes Risborough, the line was liberated from the confines of the Chilterns and spread out in several directions across the flat plains beyond. In 1863 a line was built to Aylesbury: this is the line that goes through Monks Risborough and Little Kimble, and once again it is still single track. (This was not, incidentally, the first line to Aylesbury: a branch had been built to the town from Cheddington on the London to Birmingham line as early as 1839. There was also a branch line from Watford to Rickmansworth, opened in 1862: both lines closed in the early 1950s, though Rickmansworth and Watford remain linked by the Metropolitan Line, built 30 years later: see below.)

Another line from Princes Risborough went to Thame, reached in 1862, and by 1864 this route had linked up to a junction on the GWR line between Didcot and Oxford (which is only 23 miles from Princes Risborough). There was also a short line south westwards from Princes Risborough to Chinnor and Watlington, opened in 1872 (see Lines we lost).

Rather surprisingly given that it was quite a substantial town, the branch line to Marlow did not open until 1873, 19 years after the Wycombe Railway had started services. It was built from Bourne End (until then known as 'Marlow Road') by the Great Marlow Railway Company - a vehicle for local investors. The name did not reflect any affiliation with the Great Western: the town itself was known as Great Marlow until the end of the nineteenth century, to distinguish it from the nearby village of Little Marlow - but right from the start the Great Western Railway operated the branch, and went on to buy it in 1897. The train on this route was known as the ‘Marlow Donkey’ (the nickname of the type of locomotive used, a shunter designed for dock work, though one likes to think it may have been a term of affection or an unflattering reference to its speed). This explains the name of the pub near Marlow station today.

The Great Western Railway is of course one of the most celebrated of Victorian railway companies, and it is the only one to have kept its identity intact until the present day. In the 'grouping' of 1923, when the Victorian companies were merged into four large ones at the urging of the government (see The golden age of the railways), the GWR kept its name and network, and merely added some other minor railways. From 1947, under nationalisation, it was the British Railways Western Region, but since privatisation in 1996-7 the franchise is once again known by its original Victorian name. Parts of its infrastructure were recognised in 1999 as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The GWR’s chief engineer and creative genius was the famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Much has been written about his various engineering marvels, but for our purposes two are worth mentioning. One is Paddington Station itself. The present structure opened in 1854, replacing an earlier station to its immediate north west, and is the oldest London terminus still in its original form (the main addition being the fourth span of the roof, added in 1910). Its once rather grimy canopy has now been fully cleaned and restored and has an opulence (see photo) that you find in no other major terminus. (The earlier station, incidentally, was right on the edge of London when it opened, surrounded by fields: it became a freight terminal and lasted in this role, through various redevelopments, until 1975.)

The other point to note is that Brunel built the main line out of Paddington to be as straight, and flat as is humanly possible: this was to make his trains fast, though the fact that he built the line to a wide 7ft gauge (ie track width: as opposed to the 4ft 8.25 inches that was standard on the rest of the rail network) also meant he needed to avoid tight curves. The wider gauge was more expensive to build, however - Brunel was an engineering genius, not a business one - and made connection with other railway companies' lines impossible. In the end the GWR bowed to the inevitable and changed its tracks to standard gauge. The Wycombe branch was converted in one week in August 1870, though some GWR lines remained broad gauge until 1892.

The famous flat-arched bridge at Maidenhead

Brunel’s obsession with keeping his railway line flat can be seen in his bridge across the Thames at Maidenhead, which can be seen close up on the Maidenhead to Marlow walk. Opened in 1839, this has the two flattest brick arches ever built – 128 feet or 39 metres wide, but only 24 feet or 7 metres high - and was built this way to keep gradients on this stretch of line down to just 1 foot in 1,320. This bridge is the one that features in the famous 1844 Turner painting Rain, Steam and Speed, now in the National Gallery.

Maidenhead was the first terminus of the Great Western when it started services from Paddington in 1838, though the original station for the town was the one now called Taplow, on the London side of the bridge: it was not until 1878 that the current Maidenhead station opened. The line was swiftly expanded westwards to Twyford (1839), Reading (1840) and on via Pangborne and Goring, where it passes through the Chilterns, to Swindon (all reached in 1840) and Bristol (1841).

An early branch line was the one from Reading to Hungerford, via Aldermaston, Newbury and Kintbury, all reached in 1847, which carried on to Bedwyn and Devises in 1862. Another line opened from Reading to Basingstoke in 1848, passing through Mortimer, which is apparently a fine example of one of Brunel’s ‘chalet-style’ rural stations. Both lines were built to keep the London & South Western Railway out of GWR territory.

The Newbury and Devises route was eventually extended to provide a shortcut to Plymouth, which is the normal main line route today (and the reason why you need to take great care crossing the railway line at the end of the Kintbury to Great Bedwyn walk), but this did not open until 1906. Until then the Great Western was known not just as “God’s Wonderful Railway” but also as the “Great Way Round” because all its trains to Exeter went via Bristol (as a few still do). The London & South Western had a more direct route via Salisbury (see A more rational railway) but it has always been a slower one. The Great Way Round jibe was also a reference to the GWR’s indirect route to Wales, where trains had to go via Gloucester until 1886, when the Severn Tunnel finally opened: the fast line via Bristol Parkway did not open till 1901, however.

Back in the Chilterns, the routes we use today came relatively late, perhaps because of its hilly terrain or lack of population. The Metropolitan Railway (see London's Victorian Railways) was extended as early as 1868 to Swiss Cottage, but under the chairmanship of Sir Edward Watkin (who was also chairman of the South Eastern Railway) it then went to Finchley Road, West Hampstead and Willesden Green in 1879, Harrow in 1880, Pinner in 1885, Rickmansworth in 1887, and Chorleywood, Chalfont Road (now Chalfont & Latimer) and Chesham in 1889.

The original plan was to continue from there to Berkhamsted (which is just four miles away to the north east) and Tring, but Watkin also had a secret plan to run trains from the Midlands to the Channel Tunnel, and instead the line was extended from Chalfont Road to Amersham, Great Missenden, Wendover and Aylesbury in 1892.

The previous year the Metropolitan had also taken over the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway, which had a line out to Verney Junction, a tiny stop on the Oxford to Cambridge line. The Aylesbury and Buckingham had started life in 1868 as an attempt by the Duke of Buckingham to create a major north-south railway through his Wotton estate. But the Buckinghams were never good with money (they had sold their London home, Buckingham House - now Buckingham Palace - to the royal family in 1761 and many of their country estates in 1848) - and this line was not a success. It never actually reached the town of Buckhingham, though one could change at Verney Junction to another railway, the Buckinghamshire Railway, which did.

The Metropolitan for a while revived the north-south idea, relaying and doubling the track from Aylesbury to Verney Junction, but Watkin was also chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and in 1889 had drawn up plans to drive that south from Nottingham to link with the Metropolitan Railway. It eventually did this at Quainton Road, a stop on the Aylesbury to Verney Junction line.

That left Verney Junction - a station some 50 miles from London, with no nearby village and reachable only by a dirt track -  as the unlikely northernmost terminus of the Metropolitan. It remained that way, served by only six trains a day, until 1936, when passenger services ceased beyond Aylesbury. Metropolitan trains from Amersham to Aylesbury - which were steam-hauled north of Rickmansworth - continued until 1961.

The Metropolitan also briefly had another unlikely branch - the Brill Tramway, from Quainton Road to Brill. Built by the Duke of Buckingham to serve his own estates, it opened in 1872 and was mainly aimed at moving freight. It only had one passenger coach, a train speed of 4 miles per hour, and lots of gates that had to be opened and closed by the driver or guard. Apart from a brief flurry of activity when Waddesdon Manor was built by Baron Rothschild between 1874 to 1889, its main cargo was manure. The Duke of Buckingham had ambitions to extend it to Oxford, but in 1894, after he had died, it was instead taken over by the Metropolitan. It remained a backwater and in 1935, two years after the Metropolitan became part of London Transport, was closed - the last train, on 30 November, stopping at each station to pick up staff, documents and other valuables. Amazingly, one of the two locomotives used on this line survives as the Metropolitan Line steam locomotive in the London Transport Museum.

As for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, it was entering an overcrowded market. There were already three other main lines from London to the Midlands, including the flashy Midland Railway, which was itself regarded as an upstart when it had driven south from its Derbyshire heartland and opened the grandiose St Pancras Station in 1868. The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire soon acquired the nickname of the “Money Sunk & Lost”, and when renamed the Great Central Railway in 1897, it became the “Gone Completely”. This proved prescient, as the company never paid a dividend to its shareholders.

The scheme was nevertheless approved by Parliament in 1893, but then Watkins had a stroke and had to retire. Nevertheless his line got built. It shared Metropolitan tracks from Aylesbury into London via Amersham and Harrow, and the original plan was for a merger between the two companies and a terminus combining Great Central services with those of the Metropolitan Line at Baker Street.

Baker Street station today

However, Metropolitan shareholders wisely preferred to keep their profitable London railway, with its nascent suburban traffic, apart from this more speculative long distance venture, so the track for the new line turned aside into a new station, which eventually came to be sited at Marylebone. (There was another site considered further north. In Aberdeen Place NW8, about a kilometre to the north west of the current station there is a grand former pub, now a restaurant, called Crocker's Folly, which was allegedly built in expectation of railway customers who never came.)

In the same year that Marylebone opened - 1899 - the Great Central and Great Western jointly opened a link from High Wycombe to a point near South Ruislip station, taking in Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross. This is the other main route out of Marylebone to this day. The Great Western used this for its main line to Birmingham Snow Hill until the late 1960s, and a link to it from Paddington survived, occasionally used for engineering work diversions, until it was severed by preparatory works for HS2 in 2018. These more direct lines to High Wycombe made the Bourne End to High Wycombe route redundant, and it closed in 1970, though as noted we still use the rest of the branch to go to Marlow.

Marylebone was the very last London terminus to be built and it had grand ambitions - as can be seen from the Landmark Hotel across the road from it, originally the Great Central Hotel. The station itself also looks fairly substantial from the front, though the poet John Betjeman likened its appearance to “a branch public library in a Manchester suburb”.

When you get inside, however, you find four platforms tucked away at one end, and in fact the station never had more than this, even though it was originally planned to have ten. Despite its grandiose name, the Great Central never attracted many customers - the first three trains into Marylebone only had 52 passengers in total, barely outnumbering the staff. In the first half of the twentieth century there were just 13 passenger services a day, seven of them express trains to Manchester.

The rest of the land behind the terminal was eventually sold off to developers, and when the station wanted two new platforms in 2006 they had to be built awkwardly at the far end of platform four. The hotel, which had never flourished, became the headquarters of British Railways in 1948.

The station nearly closed altogether. After 1959 it lost its long distance services beyond Nottingham, and in the Beeching cuts in 1966 all services north of Aylesbury were stopped. In the 1980s it was proposed to route the remaining High Wycombe service into Paddington and link Aylesbury back into the Metropolitan Line. Marylebone was to be demolished and turned into a bus station. A closure notice was issued in 1984, though rescinded in 1986 after fierce opposition.

As late as the 1990s the station was only used by commuters and was deserted in the middle of the day, but since then everything has turned around. Services into Marylebone have increased and the hotel, which reopened in 1991, has gone from strength to strength. Chiltern Railways has been one of the big success stories of the 1996 rail privatisation, even re-starting services to Birmingham Snow Hill on the old Great Western main line.

In 2015 the company also opened a new link between Marylebone and Oxford. This uses not the old GWR line from Princes Risborough to Thame and Oxford mentioned earlier in this section – that line closed in 1963 – but a new link from the Chiltern main line at Bicester. This in turn is part of the planned reopening of the Oxford to Bedford line, fifty years after it closed in the Beeching cuts (see The controversial Dr Beeching). A disused section of the old Great Central route beyond Aylesbury will also be opened to passenger services as part of the scheme, linking into the Oxford to Bedford line and allowing Chiltern trains to run from Aylesbury to Milton Keynes.

These are the first new non-high speed rail links into London in over a century, and surely a resounding riposte to all those in the 1960s and 1970s who thought that railways were a thing of the past.

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