The Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway was a 7 ft 0 1⁄4 in (2,140 mm) broad gauge railway that linked the Great Western Railway at Swindon, Wiltshire, with Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England. Much of the route is still in regular use today (see Golden Valley Line).
The line between Cheltenham and Gloucester was worked jointly with the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, necessitating mixed gauge track and shared maintenance. The line between Gloucester and Standish Junction was owned by the C&GWUR, but the Bristol and Gloucester Railway had running rights over it. The Bristol and Gloucester Railway and 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge Birmingham and Gloucester Railway then merged, and were then quickly taken over by the Midland Railway. The Bristol & Gloucester line was soon converted to standard gauge to allow through trains from Bristol to Birmingham, thus extending the mixed gauge as far south as Standish. Despite this joint working, the stations were generally independent with the individual railways providing duplicate facilities at Cheltenham, Gloucester and Stonehouse.
Read more about Cheltenham And Great Western Union Railway: Chronology, Stations
Famous quotes containing the words cheltenham, western, union and/or railway:
“Here lies I and my three daughters,
Killed by drinking the Cheltenham waters.
If we had stuck to our Epsom salts
We’d not be lying in these vaults.”
—Anonymous. From H. J. Loaring’s Curious Records (1872)
“It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.””
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“If the Union is once severed, the line of separation will grow wider and wider, and the controversies which are now debated and settled in the halls of legislation will then be tried in fields of battle and determined by the sword.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)