The Mangotsfield and Bath Branch Line was a railway line opened by the Midland Railway Company in 1869 to connect Bath to its network at Mangotsfield, on its line between Bristol and Birmingham. It was usually referred to as "the Bath branch" of the Midland Railway.
The line never achieved great importance, but for many years it carried heavy summer holiday traffic from Midlands cities to Bournemouth over the Somerset and Dorset line, which connected to it at Bath. In the 1960s these trains, and the daily "Pines Express", became famous among railway enthusiasts, as did the station at Bath, by then named "Green Park".
The line closed in 1966 except for a minimal coal delivery to Bath which continued until 1971.
Much of the route now forms the Bristol and Bath Railway Path, and the Avon Valley Railway operates a heritage steam railway activity at Bitton.
Read more about Mangotsfield And Bath Branch Line: Beginnings, The Route, Train Services, The Somerset and Dorset Line Arrives, Later Years, After Closure
Famous quotes containing the words bath, branch and/or line:
“I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,that were a bath and a medicine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“What can the dove of Jesus give
You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,
The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.”
—Robert Lowell (19171977)
“For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”
—Ralph Nader (b. 1934)