Brill Tramway - After Closure

After Closure

After closure, the line was largely forgotten. Because it had been built on private land without an Act of Parliament, few records of it prior to the Oxford extension schemes exist in official archives. At least some of the rails remained in place in 1940, as records exist of their removal during the building of RAF Westcott. Other than the station buildings at Westcott and Quainton Road almost nothing survives of the tramway, although much of the route can still be traced by a double line of hedges. The former trackbed between Quainton Road and Waddesdon Road is now a public footpath known as the Tramway Walk.

After the death of the 3rd Duke of Buckingham the family archives, including the records of the Brill Tramway, were sold to the Huntington Library in California. In 1968 the London Underground Railway Society launched a fundraising appeal to microfilm the relevant material, and in January 1971 the microfilms were opened to researchers at the University of London Library (now Senate House Library).

In the 1973 documentary Metro-land, John Betjeman spoke of a 1929 visit to Quainton Road, and of watching a train depart for Brill: "The steam ready to take two or three passengers through oil-lit halts and over level crossings, a rather bumpy journey".

Wotton station on the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway, which in 1923 had been taken over by the London and North Eastern Railway, remained open (albeit little used and served by only two trains per day in each direction) until 7 December 1953, when the line was abandoned. The bridge that had formerly carried the GW&GCJR over the tramway at Wotton was demolished in 1970, and the former GW&GCJR station was converted to a private house.

Both Dorton Halt and Brill and Ludgersall stations were closed under the Beeching Axe on 7 January 1963 and trains no longer stop, although the line through them remains in use by trains between Princes Risborough and Bicester North. Quainton Road station was bought in 1969 by members of the London Railway Preservation Society to use as a permanent base, and now houses the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. The station is still connected to the railway network and used by freight trains and occasional special passenger services, but no longer has a scheduled passenger service. There are no longer any open railway stations in the areas formerly served by the tramway. Plans have been proposed by the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre to rebuild and reopen a stretch of the tramway as a heritage railway.