History
The station opened in 1860 as Kentish Town on the Hampstead Junction Railway from Camden Road to Old Oak Common Junction south of Willesden Junction. It was renamed Gospel Oak in 1867 when a new station more appropriately named Kentish Town was opened about a kilometre south on the same line (that station is now Kentish Town West). Due to financial constraints the planned connection from the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway to Gospel Oak station was added on 4 June 1888, some twenty years after that railway opened, and then without a link to the North London Line due to other companies' opposition. The 1914 map below shows the line still a stub.
From 1926 to 1981, the station was not a passenger interchange: passenger trains left the Barking line at Tufnell Park and descended the gradient to Kentish Town station. In 1981 that passenger service from Barking was diverted from Kentish Town to Gospel Oak with the terminal platform rebuilt on the north side of the existing station.
The North London Line through Gospel Oak was electrified on the fourth-rail 660 volt DC system in 1916 by the LNWR: in the 1970s that was changed to 750 volt DC third rail. In 1996, the line from Willesden through Gospel Oak to Camden was closed during conversion to 25kv AC overhead.
Read more about this topic: Gospel Oak Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“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)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)