History
The station was opened on 1 September 1892, by the Metropolitan Railway (Met), when its main line was extended from Chalfont Road to Aylesbury Town. The Great Central Railway served the station from 1899, connecting the station to Leicester, Nottingham, and Sheffield.
When London Underground's Metropolitan Line (the successor of the Met) was fully electrified in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a decision was made to run only as far as Amersham. This meant that Stoke Mandeville is now only served by mainline services. In 1966 as a result of the Reshaping of British Railways report, the line north of Aylesbury was closed and the station is now only served by local commuter services. Services were run by British Rail until privatisation in 1996, when Chiltern Railways took over the franchise.
During the modernisation of the Met in the 1950s, the down (Aylesbury) platform buildings were demolished. In 1989-90 BR's Network SouthEast refurbished the station and the "up" (London) platform canopy was shortened slightly.
The lawn at the station front features several sculptures including a statue of a former employee.
Read more about this topic: Stoke Mandeville Railway Station
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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