Ockley Railway Station

Ockley railway station serves the villages of Ockley and Capel in Surrey, England and is situated 1.4 miles from Ockley village and only half a mile west of the village of Capel. The station is 29 railway miles (47 km) south of London Victoria station. Ockley is managed by Southern which also provides all the services.

It opened as Ockley & Capel on 1 May 1867 as part of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway extension to Horsham. Its situation next to Le Steeres of Jayes Park brickworks (closed c 1914) and nearby Phorpres Works (now Clockhouse Works) allowed for substantial brickwork traffic for many years. Milk traffic was also important until the early 1930s when this trade was lost to road transport.

Goods traffic declined slowly over the next thirty years ceasing finally in June 1962.

The station could very easily have suffered a similar fate (with the potential loss of many of its most important historic features - especially the wooden station canopy) as Warnham station level crossing and signal box, but in recent years Ockley Station has been protected from such an outcome by the efforts of one of the property owners living in the Station Approach who a number of years ago successfully applied to English Heritage to have the station Grade II listed. This means Network Rail must maintain it in its present form.

A great deal of further detail on the history of this station and the entire section of line between Dorking and Horsham can be found in John Harrod's Up The Dorking

Read more about Ockley Railway Station:  Services, Facilities, Fares, Journey Times

Famous quotes containing the words railway and/or station:

    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)

    I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)