Marylebone railway station

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The main entrance to Marylebone station.

Marylebone station is a railway station in central London. The station has only four platforms making it one of the smallest of the railway terminals in London, and apart from Waterloo International it is the newest.

Train services into the station are run by Chiltern Railways which serves routes to Aylesbury, High Wycombe, Bicester, Banbury, Leamington Spa, and Birmingham (Snow Hill).

The station is located midway between the mainline stations at Euston and Paddington (about 1.5 km from each), and is served by Marylebone tube station.

In 1964 several scenes in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night were filmed at Marylebone station.

It also has a degree of fame because of its presence in the British version of Monopoly.

History

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.

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 four platforms.

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

Passenger traffic on the GCR was never heavy, due largely to its being the last main line to be built, which meant it had difficulty competing against its well-established rivals for the lucrative intercity passenger business.

Marylebone had a fairly quiet and uneventful existence until 1966, when the Great Central Railway was closed north of Aylesbury as part of the Beeching axe. The GCR's closure was the single largest railway closure of the Beeching era.

This meant that Marylebone was now the terminus for local services to Aylesbury and High Wycombe only. After the 1960s, lack of investment meant that the local services and the station itself became increasingly run down. In the early 1980s there was a proposal to close Marylebone, divert its services into nearby Paddington station, and convert Marylebone into a coach station. But these plans were deemed impractical and dropped.

A major turn around 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 adjacant goods yard and some land previously used by two of the existing platforms. These two platforms were replaced by removing the existing taxi road and using that land for two replacement platforms. The aging fleet of trains on the local services was replaced by a fleet of state-of-the-art 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. There are plans to open two new platforms to replace those closed once a new depot further along the line is built and opened.

External links

• Marylebone station timetable from National Rail's Live Departure Boards
• Street map of Marylebone station, from multimap.com

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