East Kent Railway - Westerly Extension To The Line

Westerly Extension To The Line

In November 1855, soon after gaining authority for the Dover extension, but before it had opened any line, the Company again gave notice of application to Parliament to extend their lines in to both London and Westminster. Their draft proposals involved the construction of fourteen stretches of line involving links with several existing or proposed railways. These included the SER at Dartford, Lewisham and or Greenwich; the London Brighton and South Coast Railway near Deptford; the proposed Westminster Terminus Railway at Manor-Street; and the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway (WEL&CPR) near St Mary Cray. This scatter-gun approach to building new lines into London by a company which was already deeply in debt and was finding it difficult to raise money to complete its existing lines was criticized in the press.

Nevertheless, in 1856 the EKR introduced a Parliamentary Bill seeking running powers over the SER to Dartford, and then to build a new line to link to the proposed Mid Kent line of the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway. Running powers over the latter railway would then give the EKR access to Battersea Wharf station of the WEL&CPR. The SER successfully fought off this attempt, arguing that their North Kent Line was already operating at full capacity. At one stage they even announced publicly ‘that they would handle no East Kent traffic.’

Proposals by Joseph Locke, Consulting Engineer to the SER, for the amalgamation of that railway and the EKR were discussed by both sides in June 1858, although some of the SER directors were unhappy about taking on such a financially insecure company. Furthermore, under Locke’s proposals, the services of Thomas Crampton, the engineer, contractor and part financier of the Canterbury-Dover line, would be dispensed with. Crampton managed to persuade the EKR board to accept an alternative proposal, that he would finance the westerly extension towards London. The EKR board therefore put forward a revised set of proposals to Parliament in 1858. These involved building their own line from Strood to St Mary Cray where it would connect to the WELCPR at Shortlands (then named Bromley). This plan gave the EKR potential access to Battersea, and later to Victoria station via the Victoria Station & Pimlico Railway. However, on 1 August 1859 the EKR changed its name to the London Chatham and Dover Railway, before these new lines were completed.