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:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)