History
The station was first opened by the South Eastern Railway in 1866 as Eltham Station. In 1892 it was renamed Eltham & Mottingham. In 1927 it became Mottingham station.
The goods yard on the down side to the west of the platforms included a large coal office. A footbridge linking the two platforms was opened in the 1890s. Half a dozen sidings used for rolling stock were built around 1900 on the down side opposite the goods yard.
A three-storey high substation was built next to the station when the Dartford Loop Line was electrified in 1926. The substation was demolished in 1957 later to be replaced by more powerful substations at New Eltham and Hither Green.
On 19 March 1946 the station was the location of a fatal accident when an electric passenger train collided with a stationary light engine that was waiting to move into the sidings. The driver of the passenger train was killed and 13 passengers injured.
In 1955 the platforms were lengthened to take ten carriage trains. The goods yard closed and five of the six rolling stock sidings were decommissioned in 1968. The signal box closed the following year. In 1992 the platforms were lengthened again and in 2012 the platforms are again being extended to take twelve carriage trains.
The up side ticket office has a mixture of structures, the white clapboard dating from the original station of 1866, with brown brick construction of 1957 and sliding doors installed in 1988.
The station has a 177 space car park operated by Meteor Parking on behalf of Southeastern.
Read more about this topic: Mottingham Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)