A thread for learning about obscure mainline train station towns.

i live in one of those towns in between manchester-liverpool, one of the larger ones though.

There isn't even a gate there, let alone a town!

There's a Makro, but surely you'd take your car or van to Makro?

There are a few furniture warehouses too and a couple of distribution depots.

I don't think Hillington needs two train stations.

Next station up the line from where I grew up (en route into Glasgow Central) - did anybody ever live there? Does it only exist when you go through it in the train, since it's untraceable by road?

Stood on the wrong side of the platform, boarded the wrong train and had to walk miles back home. Had shiny red carrier bag welts on my hands for days.

I've always thought Kings Langley looked nice (I like valley towns/villages), from the M25 at least but it could've been a trick of the early morning light.

yay that's my home!

Newton station serves not a town called Newton (I don't think there is such a place) but is located instead in a housing scheme known as Westburn, or, in the vernacular, 'the Circuit'. Westburn one of the most socially-deprived areas in South Lanarkshire and, not paradoxically, is infested with bams. Realistically, it's everything you could imagine a suburb of Cambuslang to be. If you're ever curious, stay on the train.

It is bizarre, though - as you cross the river from leafy Kylepark to slate-grey Newton, it really is like "Apocalypse: Before And After."

Wolverton is one of those places like Crewe or Cleethorpes that wasn't there at all before the railway line was built. The town of Crewe was built to build railway engines; the town of Wolverton was built to build train carriages.

Things I know about Radley:
1. It houses an expensive public school.
2. You can walk to Boars Hill from there.
3. erm...

a) also in a field
b) but only 10 minutes' walk from, um, a ruined abbey
c) with an amazing one train every two hours, if you're lucky
d) err ...
e) ... that's it.

Ever been to Barrow Haven, FP? There's not much there except for some mud.

First class carriage positions on the West Coast line are governed by the direction of the train relative to the buffers at London, so trains leaving from Glasgow, or Manchester have first class at the front, so the passengers only have to walk a bit upon destination. Trains leaving London have first class at the rear, so those boarding in London only have a short distance to travel.*

This means that most stations on the line have the exit towards the south of the station, so first class passengers will be getting the quickest exits, so to snaffle the taxis first. Except Wigan, where the exit was always closest to the smoking carriage, cementing it in my affections.

It also has the Swan and Railway, which is grebt and scuzzy. And you could see the football ground, which I love spotting from train windows.

Long Buckby is an amainzglt rubbish station - it's a halt, and isn't a main line - just that mainline trains use it as the Miltopn Keynes to Rugby route has two options - the mainline and the commuter line via Northampton.

Oxenholme is not gateway to the Lakes. It's 'Oxenholme (slight pause) the Lake District'

xpost - Didcot only exists because Abingdon didn't want one of those nasty rail lines.

* - Americans! use this fact as a lovely emblematic tale which provides a window onto how obsessed we are by class.

"[Preston's] a very busy station - lots of different lines going everywhere"

Same as Crewe.

I have to admit, I've never been to Barrow Haven - apart from passing through it on the way (by train and bus) to Hull.

Lancaster
Preston
Wigan North Western

(I think the only triangular station left in Britain now is Shipley, but I could be wrong)

tring - small version of berkhamsted. best feature: rothchilds hangout. this includes the natural history museum which is frankly, awesome. here is an example of a dodo from there:

http://images.buzznet.com/assets/users2/hollo/taxidermy/gallery-msg-1082564768-2.jpg

this museum is full of stuffed fleas which was a obsession of one of the rothschilds. same one who was obsessed with bacteria, died this year some time.

tring is pretty nice, got bypassed by the train in the 19th c and sort of remained small whilst berkhamsted got much bigger. (the station is about 1 mile from the town)

kings langley - yeah this is nice too, but rather sprawling, super linear, so its very long, although not that big. threshers is the local hang out. landmarks include: ovaltine facotry which is being turned into a steaming pile of shit, enormous motorway that dominates everything (m25)

berkhamsted (birkhampstead is national rail enquiries bastard creation when looking towards merseyside) - hooray! this is my hometown. famous inhabitants include graham green, william cowper, beverley craven and simon reynolds. commuter town which is nice enough, used to have biggest waitrose in europe until sheffield one opened. has award winning organic butchers and the only 100% organic shop in the country (ie every single item is created using organically produced materials). this pretty much sums up the population of berkhamsted. traditional population eroded as 2.4 children families in SUVs buy up nice over priced houses and send their kids to a 'good school' (nb not a 'great' school, what nick hornby described as a non-descript public school).
horrendous traffic due to school run in mornings. landmarks include waitrose, st peter church, station where bianca ran away to somewhere from eastenders.
no music scene to speak of, save a d'n'b night in the civic centre of which i was one of 3 attendants, also a breakbeat/garage night in a pub which made the pavement shake.
jazz scene is more vibrant, michael garrick lives here and plays a lot.
footbal lclub gets average 50 people per game, save when they got into the fa vase final at villa park, against taunton, took 10000 people there, and gazza came out as a berko fan. i was in russia, but i would have been sickened by the treachery of a town content to drapes itself in balck and white when things go well then never darken the doors of broadwater again.

hemel - hmmmm. strange 60s town planning experiment whereby a nice old village (old hemel) overnight got 100000 more people stuck to the side, including shopping centre which is useless, leisure park, incl. areas only "club", "visage/ethos" (scene of many a quaking in the queue and clutching of borrowed ID). quite like hemel, my cousin who is from there made a book of conversations with people in hemel (suzy has a copy). it is a bit scary on a friday night, some dude got killed with scaffolding outside wetherspoons.
hemel has kodak HQ, good theatre (old town hall) and much better restaurants than berkhamsted (in old hemel), paradoxically given the discrepancy in incomes. industrial estate with enormous dixons and the aquascutum factory shop!
different areas of hemel are seperated by thin strips of green, and have small parades of shops. famous inhabitants include: those kids that mashed themselves up by trying to reenact star wars scenes with lit flourescent tubes as light sabres.

the best roundabout ever. and far more impressive than the pathetic contender from swindon.

i used to fancy a girl from tring arts ed (the ballet school)

I’d add Bicester to this list, but it’s at the end of the line, and rightly so. I’ve never tried Bicester North, but I imagine it to be much of the same.

I went to the Nat. Hist. Mus. at Tring when I was in primary school. It was ace! My friend's mum bought me a piece of quartz because I couldn't afford it myself. I still have it.

Industrial estates need train stations because people who work in shitty warehouses on industrial estates don't make enough money to afford cars to drive to their shitty jobs (or so say the folk I work with). However in many years of commuting from Glasgow to Paisley and back again, I have never seen very many people using Hillingtons East or West. They do, however, have houses on one side and industrial estates on the other, so maybe they are useful for residents of Hillington (though Hillington West actually backs onto Penilee where people have to take trains because their cars are up on bricks).

Cardonald station, now there's a pointless one. Under a motorway slip road, next to the crematorium, miles away from any houses and even more miles away from anything that you would consider to be actually in Cardonald (see also Paisley St James, which I am convinced no-one in the world actually uses, given that it's in the middle of nowhere).

hi dere!

weirdly, shipley now only has 5 instead of 6 platforms, so its still triangular, but the bradford-skipton part, both directions use the same platform, whereas the other 2 sides of the triangle use both sides

Anyway, obscure != useless, you bunch of fecking Beechings.

On the other hand, the Leeds-Skipton arm didn't have any platforms at all until the 1970s, and only had one for about 20 years - I don't think Shipley has ever had more than five platforms.

I remember the seeping damp descent underground after Dalmarnock only too well. Also the SECC station before the SECC had been built and it was still called Finnieston. When you stepped out of it you realise where Jerry Dammers must have got the inspiration for "Ghost Town." A long, bleak haul on foot to the slum end of Argyle Street.

No, I think that honour maybe goes to Paisley St James (except it's only Gilmour Street that has a badly-timed bus service and a taxi rank, and therefore serves as the official station for the airport).

(xpost)

Just past Central Station, he saw lights coming towards him, and the sound of a diesel engine. He flattened himself against the wall, rather scared, thinking: "what the hell's this?". It turned out to be a rather large truck belonging to a demolition company, who were knocking down a building on Argyle St. When they got down into the basement they'd knocked through into the railway tunnel, so were using the old line to haul their rubble away rather than drive through the centre of Glasgow.

Gascoigne named as Kettering boss
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/4381852.stm

Kettering nomark town in Northants

So much of my preadolescence seemed to be spent waiting for connections (but actually quite pleased if they were late - more time spent gazing at expresses thundering by) at Wigan NW, Shotton, Oxenholme (no subtitle then), Warrington BQ, Wrexham General, West Allerton, Newton-le-Willows...

If there's a book in me, and there's probably isn't, it will be have something of the flavour of these stations.

then delete me please

The inferance is that there were Bradford-Leeds and Bradford- Skipton Platform but that Leeds-Skipton did not stop at shipley, only at Saltaire (also served by Bradford-Skipton).

That's not the track that runs between them now, right? Because it comes out of being a tunnel for a bit at Bridgeton.

And no, I can't recall what possessed me to make a panorama of such a depressing place.

That doesn't address whether or not the first Leeds-Skipton platform predates the singling of the Bradford-Skipton chord, but I'm positive that it does.

heres the full one.

yes, it seems both happened between 1978 and 1984.

looks like there werent even 5 platforms in use until 1994 then

How long is it?

I'd been led to believe that Greenock West > Fort Matilda at 2 miles (or thereabouts) was the longest.

Is there an O2 Centre in Finchley, as well?

I only know the one on the Finchley Road.

They've got a huge Sainsburys, though.

That was the longest in the 1970s, when the Argyll Line was closed.

Does the fact that this (pointless railway trivia: the tunnel from Anderston to Dalmarnock is the longest standard-gauge railway tunnel in Scotland) is actually incorrect make a difference? (as pointed out upthread, the train comes out from a tunnel between Dalmarnock and Bridgeton, before going back into a tunnel just out of Bridgeton station?

(Yeah, I could google, but I like to let FP be a trainspotter about this, also googling names of train stations and tunnels and stuff gives me teh fear and I don't know how to be more specific and where exactly to look)

Station Usage for 2013 - Tees-Side Airport lowest usage again with 14 passengers per year. The least used station i've used myself was Strines (10,000) in 11/12 but has doubled to 21,112 due to improvements. i cant imagine how bad it was before as its a muddy climb with no lighting of any kind

Gainborough Central is an interesting one, it had 1128 passengers last year, but only 1 season ticketed journey. Presumably with minimal train frequency that person soon realized their mistake

Must be a political station with differing views on how it should be server..

Annual rail passenger usage Gainsborough Central
2002/03 8
2004/05 21
2005/06 21
2006/07 33,217
2007/08 1,127
2008/09 1,172
2009/10 1,438
2010/11 1,134
2011/12 1,334

In June 2013 in a letter to RAIL magazines Open Access, Gainsborough Central was described as "Something you would find in war-torn Beirut."

In the Times newspaper on the January 8 2014 the station was said to be "The worst on the British rail network"

I had assumed the general consensus on this was Wakefield Kirkgate!