West London Line - History

History

The Birmingham, Bristol & Thames Junction Railway was authorised in 1836 to run from a point on the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR), near the present Willesden Junction station, across the proposed route of the Great Western (GWR) on the level, to the Kensington Canal Basin. Construction was delayed by engineering and financial problems. Renamed the West London Railway (WLR) the line officially opened on 27 May 1844, and regular services began on 10 June, but before that trials to demonstrate the potential of the atmospheric railway system had been held from 1840 to 1843 on a half-mile section of track adjacent to Wormwood Scrubs, leased to that system's promoters; The WLR itself used conventional power but was not a commercial success. The low number of passengers became such a regular target of Punch magazine that the line was called Punch's Railway. After only six months it closed entirely on 30 November 1844.

An Act of 1845 authorised the GWR and the L&BR (which became part of the London and North Western Railway in 1846) to take a joint lease of the WLR. The line was used only to carry coal, passenger service was not re-introduced.

A further Act in 1859 granted those two companies with two others, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) and the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR), power to construct the West London Extension Joint Railway on the filled-in canal south from the Kensington Basin to the bridge under the Kings Road, to bridge the Thames and to connect near Clapham Junction to railways south of the river. The track of the existing line was doubled, and the flat crossing of the GWR main line, where a number of collisions had occurred, was replaced by a flyover. The new line opened on 2 March 1863 with a passenger station at Addison Road (now Kensington (Olympia)) slightly north of the original WLR Kensington station, and was then well used by various inner London services for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

The northern section of the line, from Willesden Junction to Kensington Olympia and on to Earls Court, was electrified by the LNWR in 1915, but passenger use of the line dwindled under competition from road transport and the lines which were to become the Underground network, and passenger services were discontinued after bomb damage in 1940.

One or two trains each working morning ran to carry workers at the Post Office Savings Office near Olympia from Clapham Junction and back in the evening. Normal passenger services were resumed by 1994. Channel Tunnel infrastructure work in 1993 electrified the line at 750 V DC third rail from the south to the North Pole depot. The line is electrified with 25 kV AC overhead wires from Westway (near the overbridge carrying the Hammersmith and City Line) to Willesden and the north.

Platforms were reinstated at West Brompton in 1999. New stations opened at Shepherd's Bush in 2008, and Imperial Wharf in 2009, bringing main line rail services to a large catchment area in West London.