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Marylebone station

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Marylebone station or London Marylebone station is a National Rail and London Underground station in central London. The station is located midway between the mainline stations at Euston and Paddington, about 1 mile (1.6 km) from each. It is in Travelcard Zone 1.

National Rail

The mainline station has six platforms; five originally built in 1899, one being removed in the late 1960s, and two built in September 2006. Following two new platforms being opened, it is no longer the smallest of the railway terminals in London, although apart from the now defunct Waterloo International (replaced by the terminus at St Pancras Station opened in November 2007) it remains the newest. Marylebone is operated by Chiltern Railways.

Train services into the station are run by Chiltern Railways which serves the Chiltern Main Line and London to Aylesbury Line routes to High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Bicester, Banbury, Leamington Spa, Stratford-upon-Avon, Birmingham (Snow Hill), and Kidderminster..

Marylebone is also due to be served by at 5 trains per day to Wrexham which are to be operated by the Wrexham, Shropshire & Marylebone Railway commencing in spring 2008. From March 2008 trains have started to test the timetable but they have not carried any passengers.

Around six million passengers use London Marylebone every year.

History

Pre 1958 - GCR and LNER

The station was opened in 1899 and was the terminus of the Great Central Railway's new London extension main line, which was the last major railway line to be built into London, until High Speed 1. The designer was Henry William Braddock, a civil engineer for the Great Central Railway. The design is in a modest, uninflated domestic version of the "Wrenaissance" revival style that owed some of its popularity to work by Norman Shaw; it harmonises with the residential surroundings with Dutch gables, employing warm brick and cream-colored stone.

Originally Marylebone station was planned as a ten-platform station, but the cost of building the GCR was far higher than expected and nearly bankrupted the company. This forced the original plans for the station to be dramatically scaled back to just five platforms, four within the train shed and one west of the train shed (platform 5). The concourse is unusually long and for some 50 years it only had three walls, the northern wall missing, as the GCR anticipated that the other five platforms, with a train shed, would be built later on. The cost of the London Extension also made The Great Central Hotel to be built not within the station complex and by a different company.

The Great Central Railway linked London to High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Manchester. Also, a number of local services from northwest Middlesex, High Wycombe and Aylesbury terminated at Marylebone.

Passenger traffic on the GCR was never heavy, largely because it was the last main line to be built, which meant it had difficulty competing against its well-established rivals (especially the Midland Railway and its terminal St Pancras) for the lucrative intercity passenger business. Also the line went through vasts amounts of countryside, thus not attracting much passenger business. The GCR also struggled to compete with the Metropolitan Railway for 2nd and 3rd class traffic from nearby towns such as Harrow, Chesham and Aylesbury. The GCR had the upper hand on 1st class travel between these towns as the GCR was quick, reliable and luxurious compared to the Met. Due to low passenger traffic, Marylebone was considered the quietest yet the most pleasant of London's termini.

Despite poor passenger traffic, the line was heavily used for freight, especially coal and trains ran from the North to the former Marylebone freight depot which used to lie next door to the station.

The heyday of the line was between 1924 and 1958 in which the GCR was absorbed into the LNER (later became the BR Eastern Region after nationalisation). As a result many prestigous locomotives, such as Flying Scotsman, Sir Nigel Gresley, and Mallard which ran on the East Coast Main Line, were also frequent visitors to the line. Special trains also ran on the line to destinations such as Scotland.

1958 to 1980s - The Cuts

Long-distance trains from Marylebone began to be scaled back from 1958 after the line's transfer to the BR Midland Region. The line was thought to be a duplicate of the Midland Main Line by the region. The Master Cutler was diverted to St Pancras via the Midland Main Line. By 1960 there were no daytime trains running to destinations north of Nottingham, although a few still ran at night. In 1966 a large part of the former Great Central Railway was closed north of Aylesbury as part of the Beeching axe. This meant that Marylebone was now the terminus for local services to Aylesbury and High Wycombe only. The GCR's closure was the single largest railway closure of the Beeching era.

After the 1960s, lack of investment meant that the local services and the station itself became increasingly run down. Marylebone became the number one place in London to see heritage trains. The most eastern platform (platform 1) and its adjacent siding was removed and a taxi road replaced it. In the early 1980s there was a proposal to close Marylebone, divert British Rail services via High Wycombe into nearby Paddington, and extend the Metropolitan Line to Aylesbury, so London trains via Amersham would be routed to Baker Street. Marylebone was to be converted into a coach station with the tracks converted to a road for coaches only. However these plans were deemed impractical and dropped.

1980s onwards - Success

A major turnaround in the station's fortunes occurred in the late 1980s, when British Rail decided to divert many services from overcrowded Paddington station into Marylebone. The station was given a multi-million-pound facelift financed by selling off the redundant adjacent goods yard and some land previously used by the platform beside the train shed (platform 5 in 1899, platform 4 after late 60s). This platform was replaced by removing the existing taxi road and using that land to reinstate a replacement platform (platform 1) and a siding. The ageing fleet of trains (Class 115) on the local services was replaced by a fleet of state-of-the-art Turbo trains.

In the 1990s, upon rail privatisation, the station was given an even bigger boost when Chiltern Railways took over the rail services. Chiltern trains made the station the terminus for a new intercity service to Birmingham's Snow Hill station. To cope with Chiltern Railways' success over the last ten years and to cope with increased passenger numbers, a new platform (platform 6) opened in May 2006. This was part of Chiltern's £70-million project Evergreen 2. Platform 5 and the shortened platform 4 opened in September 2006. The canopies on platforms 5 & 6 were built in a similar style to the canopy on the original platform 5, which was demolished in the 1980s. Additionally, a new depot has recently opened near Wembley Stadium railway station to compensate for the closure of Marylebone's station sidings and to make way for the new platforms. To highlight Chiltern's success, some services from Marylebone have also now been extended beyond Birmingham to Kidderminster. Success has been so great that Marylebone now serves more passengers compared to its former rival terminal, St Pancras.

Future

In late January 2006, a new company called the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway (WSMR), was formed. In September 2007, the Office of Rail Regulation granted the company, trading as Wrexham & Shropshire permission to operate services from Wrexham (in North Wales) via Shrewsbury, Telford and the West Midlands to Marylebone from early 2008. This will restore direct services to London from Wrexham and Shropshire.

Chiltern Railways have suggested that they want to reopen the Great Central Main Line north of Aylesbury to Rugby and if successful Leicester. They have also looked into the possibility of reopening the line between Princes Risborough and Oxford. This would give Oxford an additional link, which could be faster than the current one, to London. However, this was not a franchising commitment. Chiltern have also hinted that they may connect to Oxford by building a new line at Bicester connecting the Chiltern Main Line with the Varsity Line.

It is possible that in the future a new station may be constructed on the main line out of Marylebone. There is currently a large gap North of Marylebone until trains reach either Wembley Statium or Harrow-on-the-Hill station. The station is most likely to be located somewhere near the former Lord's tube station or Marlborough Road tube station. It could be made an interchange with the Metropolitan Line, which also has a large gap between stations.

In Popular Culture

  • In 1964 several scenes in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night were filmed at Marylebone station.
  • The station appeared in an episode of Magnum PI while the series was filmed around London.
  • The station appeared in The IPCRESS File.
  • The station appeared in the BBC's spy drama Spooks, season 4, episode 1. The script pretended that it was Paddington.
  • The station appeared in a BBC Comedy Gavin & Stacey recently branded as London Paddington.
  • The station appeared in the Dempsey and Makepeace episode 'Judgement'.
  • The station appeared in the final episode of series 2 of Green Wing.
  • The station also has a degree of fame because of its presence in the British version of Monopoly.
  • The station was used as a location for an episode of Peep Show Series 4
  • The station appeared in the Doctor Who episode, Doctor Who and the Silurians.

- The station is used for filming as it is the cheapest major station in London to use for filming. Network Rail only charge £500 per hour for a TV production compared to £800 per hour to film at Paddington and £1000 per hour at Kings Cross.

Services

Monday-Friday (off-peak)

  • 2tph to/from Aylesbury (via Amersham)
  • 2tph to/from Birmingham Snow Hill (fast)
  • 1tph to/from High Wycombe (slow)
  • 1tph to/from Bicester North or Stratford-upon-Avon (semi-fast)

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London Underground

The underground station is served by the Bakerloo Line. It is between Baker Street and Edgware Road stations and is in Travelcard Zone 1. Access is via a set of escalators from the mainline station concourse, which also houses the underground station's ticket office.

Compared to some of the other London termini, the mainline station's Underground links are poor. This is because the mainline station was opened thirty-six years after the Metropolitan Railway constructed the first part of what is now the northern section of the Circle Line which by passes the station to the south. For mainline passengers wishing to use services on the Circle, Hammersmith and City or Metropolitan Lines, it may often be quicker to walk the short distance to nearby Baker Street station, than to make the journey on the Bakerloo Line and change trains there.

History

The underground station opened on the 27 March 1907 under the name Great Central, and was renamed Marylebone on the 15 April 1917. The original name still appears in places on the platform wall tiling, although the tiling scheme is a replacement designed to reflect the original scheme.

The present entrance opened in 1943 following the introduction of the escalators and wartime damage to the original station building that stood to the west, at the junction of Harewood Avenue and Harewood Row. This building, designed by the Underground Electric Railways Company's architect, Leslie Green, and had used lifts to access the platforms. It was demolished in 1971 and the site is now occupied by a budget hotel.

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See also

Notes

External links



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Last updated on Saturday March 08, 2008 at 13:24:12 PST (GMT -0800)
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