History
The station was opened on 2 March 1868, when the South Eastern Railway opened its cut-off line between Chislehurst and Haysden Junction. Previously, trains between London and Tunbridge Wells had taken a circuitous route via Redhill. The line was widened and the station rebuilt in 1904, expanding to six platforms. Third rail electrification reached Orpington in 1925, and extended to Sevenoaks ten years later. Crofton Roman Villa was partly destroyed by a railway cutting in the late 1900s but was(re)discovered in 1926 when work was carried out to the area to the west of the station entrance as an entrance to a new Council building. Platforms 7 and 8 were built in the early 1990s on the site of former carriage sidings. In 2008, the station became fully accessible following the opening of a new footbridge providing lift access to all platforms.
Read more about this topic: Orpington Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)