History
The first plans for the Cholsey to Wallingford line date from 1861, and envisaged an independently owned route from Moulsford to Princes Risborough via Wallingford, Benson, Watlington and Chinnor. This line was a through route, with junctions with the Great Western Railway at both Moulsford and Princes Risborough. By 1863 the plans had been amended to run from a junction nearer Cholsey than Moulsford, and to run only as far as Watlington.
The Wallingford and Watlington Railway opened as far as Wallingford in 1866, but poor traffic receipts meant that the planned extension to Watlington was given up in 1868 and the line never reached further than Wallingford. The railway was sold to the GWR in 1872 and, for reasons now forgotten, the line became popularly known as the Wallingford Bunk. The line closed to passengers in 1959, and the last goods traffic into the old Wallingford Station ran in 1965.
However most of the line was retained to serve a maltings adjacent to the railway on the outskirts of Wallingford. Rail service to this plant ceased in 1981, at which point the Cholsey and Wallingford Railway Preservation Society was formed to revive the line for tourist services. It first ran train rides for the public in 1985, with regular advertised services over the full available length of the line beginning in 1997. Steam traction has also been reintroduced.
Read more about this topic: Cholsey And Wallingford Railway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)