Metropolitan Railway Takeover of Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Services
By 1899 the Metropolitan Railway and the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company were cooperating closely. Although the existing line had been upgraded in preparation for the Oxford extension and had been authorised as a railway in 1894, construction of the extension itself had yet to begin. On 27 November the MR arranged to lease the Tramway from the O&AT, for an annual fee of £600 (about £50,000 as of 2012) with an option to buy the line outright. From 1 December 1899, the MR took over all operations on the Tramway. The O&AT's single passenger coach, a relic of Wotton Tramway days, was removed from its wheels and used as a platelayer's hut at Brill station. An elderly Brown, Marshalls and Co passenger coach was transferred to the line to replace it, and a section of each platform was raised to accommodate the higher doors of this coach using earth and old railway sleepers.
Metropolitan Railway D Class locomotives, introduced by the MR to improve services on the former Tramway line, damaged the track, and in 1910 the track between Quainton Road and Brill was relaid to MR standards using old track which had been removed from the inner London MR route but was still considered adequate for light use on a rural branch line. Following this track upgrading, the speed limit on the line was increased to 25 miles per hour (40 km/h). The Metropolitan Railway was unhappy with the performance and safety record of the D Class locomotives, and sold them to other railways between 1916 and 1922, replacing them with Metropolitan Railway A Class locomotives.
Read more about this topic: Quainton Road Railway Station
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