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Alvescot Station
Below is the old
weighbridge hut
For more picture of the
station click here
The photos on this page are
copyrighted
About the Fairford
Branch line
It was
on November
20, 1861 that the West Midlands
Railway opened the 12 mile track
between Oxford and Witney via Yarnton
and Eynsham.
Very quickly, those who had put their
money into the line realised they had
not invested in a money-spinner.
Basically the line served small
communities with¬out the heavy
industries which gave the railways
their goods-traffic profits. In fact,
at one stage, a receiver had to take
over the undertaking.
The section from Witney to Fairford
which was opened in January 1873, was
built by the East Gloucestershire
Railway and, although, the hope was to
extend the line to Cheltenham, it was
built as a single track line which
would have been very expensive to
convert to double track working.
In the end, the Great Western Railway,
which had already absorbed the West
Midlands Company in 1863, and having
worked the Witney-Fairford line for
some years, bought the East
Gloucester¬shire Railway in 1890 and
absorbed it into its system.
Although the motor bus had not then
emerged as a threat to the railway,
the Great Western decided not to risk
the capital needed to extend the line
to make
it a cross-country route.
Instead, users of the line found it
treated as a typical Great Western
branch with about four trains a day on
weekdays each way, and one on Sundays.
During the 1939-45 war the line was
kept quite busy because of the Royal
Air Force station at Brize Norton.
It was viable in those days, when the
train was the only way of travelling
quickly, although several of the
stations, as was common on branch-
lines were some distance from the
communities they were supposed to
serve.
lpEven in the war, when every effort
was being made to get people to use
the railways through the tight
rationing of petrol and diesel, the
service, to say the east, was not a
fast one.
It is 125 years ago this month that
Parliament passed an Act which
sanc¬tioned the construction of a
railway from Yarnton to Witney. There
were great hopes for this route at the
time, as the promoters envisaged
extending the line to Fairford and
ultimately Cheltenham.
Amateur railway historian Mr R. D.
Woodall recalls how the line's
extension to Fairford was sanctioned
in 1862 and opened 11 years later -
the link with Cheltenham, however,
never materialised.
On weekdays two trains only worked
between Oxford and Brize Norton;
Satur¬days a third train did the run,
and on weekdays, four trains worked
from Oxford to Fairford and back.
On Sundays one train worked from
Oxford to Fairford and back, and one
from Oxford to Brize Norton and back.
Bradshaw's Directory gives no details
of the connections at Oxford.
It took the 9.35 train from Oxford
until 10.42 to cover the 25# miles
journey to Fairford. The stops were at
Yarnton,
Eynsham, South Leigh, Witney (where
there was usually a 5-10 minute wait),
Brize Norton and Bampton, Kelmscott
and Langford, and Lechlade.
There was also a halt at Cassington.
The line has its place in history, as
the Great Western Railway used the
line to try out its automatic train
control, in¬tended to act as a check
on drivers who were tempted to
overshoot signals at danger. It was
adopted eventually throughout the
whole system, then the largest rail
network in the British Isles.
The line inevitably suffered badly in
the post-war years, through the loss
of traffic to private cars whose
owners¬preferred a door-to-door
service. It was an unsuitable casualty
to the Beeching economy axe. The
Witney to Fairford section of the line
passed into history on
June 18 1962
Click on
any image for a larger
version
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would like displayed here use the
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here
All these photos are
copyrighted
[i]Sorry about the quality of
some, but they
are from old photos. These photos are
not in any particular order, but just
entered at random
