Wycombe Railway - The Route Between Maidenhead and High Wycombe

The Route Between Maidenhead and High Wycombe

The route starts at Maidenhead, branching off the Great Western Main Line just to the west of Maidenhead's current station. The line turns north, and soon reaches the first intermediate stop, which was Maidenhead (Wycombe Junction), later renamed Maidenhead Boyne Hill. This station was situated on the Bath Road half way up Castle Hill. The station closed in 1871 when the present Maidenhead railway station was opened. The entrance to Boyne Hill station can still be seen, though it is totally bricked up and thus inaccessible. Further intermediate stops - which are still open - are at Furze Platt and Cookham. Bourne End, the next station after Cookham, was also an intermediate station, but is now terminus for this section of the line. The Great Marlow Railway branches westwards at Bourne End to Marlow. The original locomotive on this branch was nicknamed "The Marlow Donkey".

Before the closure of the line to High Wycombe it continued through Bourne End station, over the current Station Road and through the current RAC industrial estate. It approached Cores End, crossed the A4094 road and entered the agricultural areas of Wooburn Green. It then crossed a field, and some of the trackbed is now occupied by Stratford Drive.

The line then reached Wooburn Green. Wooburn Green railway station had a single platform as the line was single track. From the early 1960s, the station was unstaffed.

From Wooburn Green, the trackbed followed the north end of Flackwell Heath Golf Course. Just before the line entered Loudwater, it went under the current M40 motorway to Birmingham. Although the M40 was built after the dismantling of the track, the alignment was preserved with an overbridge, which can be viewed today from the A4094 past The Dreams Store, towards Wycombe Marsh.

At Loudwater railway station, as at Wooburn Green, the original layout was a single platform. The station was at the bottom of Treadaway Hill just after the M40 bridge. The railway conservation footpath is on one side of the road which follows the original path of the railway.

The line crossed Treadaway Hill on a level crossing and entered a wooded area. Here it passed over its first underbridge of the route, Spring Lane, which has since been removed. Then it passed under the first overbridge of the route, the Abbey Barn Road bridge. The line then progressed towards the rye area, and at what is now the Willow Court housing estate, turned sharply northwest towards Oxford Road. Here the second underbridge of the route passed over Bowden Lane, onto an embankment, towards London Road. It continued northwest until a steel girder bridge took it over A40 road, onto another embankment that took the line to what is now the Chiltern Line. Here it joins the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway from Northolt Junction, which ran alongside it into High Wycombe railway station.

There is little possibility of the line from Bourne End to High Wycombe being recommissioned as several key plots of land have subsequently been built on.

In 2008, Parliament passed the Crossrail Act to build a new cross-London line with its services terminating at Maidenhead. The preservation of the alignment of the former Wycombe Railway from property development is being considered, in order to keep viable the option to reopen this part of the Wycombe Railway to enhance north - south communications in south Buckinghamshire.