Talk:Staines and West Drayton Railway

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Connection/s to SR line

The line diagram and other references show one connection between the Staines West line and the ex-L&SWR, but there were two though not contemporaneous. In WWII a curve was laid from just south of Yeoveney Halt to an east-facing connection on the SR east-bound track to give a diversionary route if central London north-south routes were cut by bombing, the hut near Yeoveney with the token machine still stood, doorless, around 1950. Didn't the oil depot line run west from the SR westbound track then north over the Staines West branch bridge?--SilasW (talk) 19:03, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds interesting, could you update the route diagram with this as I'm not entirely sure how to draw what you've described. Hertzsprung (talk) 12:27, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There is confusion here. London's Lost Railways, C. Klapper, 1976 Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, ISBN 0 7100 8378 5, p69, says "The Great Western had also built a branch from West Drayton to Staines which ephemerally, under the stress of war, served for through communication to the London & South Western". That might be read to mean use in WWI but enemy action was unlikely to cause disruption then and a single track connection facing London at West Drayton seems not to give better access to Feltham Yard than the North London Line or Reading provided. One chord was 1940-1947. Was there an earlier link or is "L&SW" a slip for "SR" or "former L&SW"? I do not know the signalling arrangement but in the 1950s the remains of an abandoned cabin with a token machine stood on the chord a short way from where it left the Staines West line south of Yeoveny.--SilasW (talk) 14:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why uninhabited

The sparse population was not caused by flight paths which started after WWII, if the two conditions are related it is more likely that empty space influenced the siting of Heathrow. The GWR was notorious for its disdain of suburban traffic and not seeing the opportunity provided. After the war planning controls condemned the line to enduring rustic oblivion.--SilasW (talk) 10:34, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably the reservoirs are also sited there because of the empty space, and because it was a good location for gravel pits (hence Thorpe Park). Also the area lies between the conurbations of Slough and London. You could argue that the whole section of that sentence (in commas) could be left out entirely!

EdJogg (talk) 14:32, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Er, would the planning controls (and the resulting gap between London and Slough) not have had something to do with the proximity to the airport? Ehrenkater (talk) 14:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We've departed from Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines so

The London-Slough gap may hv been maintained by Green Belt regulations but the GWR did not try to develop suburbs to get profit from its branches before post-war planning laws

stopped unrestrained town growth, unlike the Metropolitan and components of the Southern (see LPTB's pre-war extensions halted by the war and afterwards dropped half built). Before WWII Middlesex and west were fruit just waiting for "developers" to pluck. Now there are fields of rape on the town side of Heathrow. No matter what effect the airport has had on specific planning applications it did not cause the basic refusal to allow infill from Hounslow thru Staines to Windsor and ...

Of course the reservoirs were built in fairly empty space but they are west of London because the water companies were forced by Victorian law to start taking Thames water only from upstream of London. The royal names of the reservoirs show by date that the GWR did not seize the opportunity.
As for gravel pits, "n" houses to the acre yield more profit than gravel extraction .--SilasW (talk) 16:24, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sources for GWR

There seems to be a paucity of reliable information about the GWR. The main WP article is concerned with the colours of spokes and the exact shade of green paint used in 1888 but is devoid of reference to branch lines or docks. The several series of multiple little books about railway lines seem none too well researched and contain some manifestly incorrect "details" (one about the NNML says that it was odd that North Acton was so called as it was in Willesden Lane, which by my reckoning is three km away). A strange circumstance is that the British Library, which by law must receive a copy of all books and so on published in the UK, has no copies of some series.
The "Atlas of the Great Western Railway as at 1947" by R.A.Cooke, revised edition, 1997 ISBN 1 874103 380 seems to be a serious attempt at finding The Truth, it lists unresolved matters, improvements since the first edition, and a number of later uncertainties with a request for help and that work (from which I have extracted "three chains") would seem to be as good a reference as can be found.--SilasW (talk) 18:11, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]