Secondary Routes of The London and South Western Railway - Routes in Hampshire

Routes in Hampshire

The original South Western Main Line, opened in stages between 1838 and 1840, linked the Hampshire towns of Basingstoke, Winchester and Southampton. However the new line did not connect with Hampshire's most politically and commercially important city, Portsmouth. Even during the construction of the SWML the company had drawn up plans to resolve this.

In 1841 the LSWR opened two separately-built lines that provided a link to the town of Gosport, less than a mile away from Portsmouth across Portsmouth Harbour. The Eastleigh to Fareham Line branched off the main line at Eastleigh and took an almost perfectly straight line to the market town and port of Fareham. Here the route joined the newly-built line to Gosport station where a ferry service completed the journey to Portsmouth itself.

This situation continued until 1847 when the LSWR's eastern rival the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened its route to Portsmouth proper via Havant. The next year the LSWR built a short line via Portchester to meet the new line as it entered Portsmouth. However, whilst Portsmouth now had its own station the route to London was still very indirect since it was via Brighton or Southampton. Businessmen and civic leaders in Portsmouth raised enough money to back a private venture by a civil engineer to build a direct route from the LSWR's station at Guildford. The line reached Havant in 1850, sparking a fierce war (both legal and, at times, physical) battle between the LB&SCR and the LSWR (who managed the services over the independently-owned line) over access rights to Portsmouth over the former's line. This reached a peak at the so-called 'Battle of Havant', but from 1859 the new Portsmouth Direct Line was bought-out by the LSWR, providing the company with a second main line to the south coast.

Meanwhile, in northern Hampshire the company had opened its line to Alton in 1852. Initially this was from a single branch from Farnham, but in 1865 a new fast line from the SWML at Brookwood through Aldershot. An independent company, the Alton, Alresford and Winchester Railway Company, had built a line between those places which also opened in 1865, with the LSWR running the trains, which worked through Alton station. In 1884 the LSWR bought out the AA&WR, becoming the full owner of the Alton to Winchester line.

In 1863 the company took over the Bishops Waltham Railway Company, which had built the Bishops Waltham branch between that village and the LSWR's Botley station on the Eastleigh to Fareham Line. The branch had not opened at the time that the BWR was taken over, so the LSWR was the first to operate services on the line.

In 1866 the LSWR built its short branch from Southampton to Netley to service the newly-opened Royal Victoria Military Hospital. A decade later, in 1876 the Portsmouth Direct Line was extended further south to reach Southsea and further west to serve the Naval Dockyard with a new station, Portsmouth Harbour.

With all the major towns and cities in Hampshire now connected, the LSWR carried out little new building in the 1880s. The only notable openings were the link between the SWML and the newly-built Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway (over the Hockley viaduct, the longest in the county) and a short section of line from the Netley branch to Fareham through Swanwick, finally completing the West Coastway Line between Southampton and Brighton in 1889.

Hampshire saw a brief but significant burst of new-line building in the 1890s. In 1894 a new line from Gosport station to Lee-on-the-Solent was built to take advantage of the growth in tourist traffic to the Isle of Wight. However the most significant new routes came about as the LSWR acted to block its greatest rival, the Great Western Railway from building its own line to Portsmouth from Reading. This blocking action took the form of two lines. The Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway was a minor route- the first in the country to be built under the terms of the 1896 Light Railways Act. The second line was the Meon Valley Railway between Alton and Fareham, built to main-line standards as a second London to Gosport route. The new lines opened in 1901 and 1903 respectively, these being the last lines in Hampshire to be built by the LSWR before the 1923 grouping.