Marylebone railway station |
Marylebone station is a railway station in central London. The
station has only six platforms making it the smallest of the railway terminals in London, and apart from Waterloo International it is the newest.
Train services into the station are run by Chiltern Railways
which serves routes to Aylesbury, High Wycombe, Bicester, Banbury, Leamington Spa, and
Birmingham (Snow Hill).
The station is located midway between the mainline stations at Euston and Paddington (about 1.5 km from
each), and is served by Marylebone tube station.
In 1964 several scenes in the Beatles film
A Hard Day's Night were filmed at
Marylebone station.
It also has a degree of fame because of its presence in the British version of Monopoly.
History
The station was opemed in 1899 and was the terminus of the Great Central Railway's new London extension
main line, which was the last major railway line to be built into London.
Originally Marylebone station was planned as a ten-platform station, but the cost of building the GCR was far higher than
expected and nearly bankrupted the company. This forced the original plans for the station to be dramatically scaled back to just
four platforms.
The Great Central Railway linked London to Aylesbury, High Wycombe, Rugby, Leicester,
Nottingham, Sheffield and
Manchester. Also, a number of local services from northwest London, Aylesbury
and High Wycombe terminated at Marylebone.
Passenger traffic on the GCR was never heavy, due largely to its being the last main line to be built, which meant it had
difficulty competing against its well-established rivals for the lucrative intercity passenger business.
Marylebone had a fairly quiet and uneventful existence until 1966, when the Great
Central Railway was closed north of Aylesbury as part of the Beeching axe.
The GCR's closure was the single largest railway closure of the Beeching era.
This meant that Marylebone was now the terminus for local services to Aylesbury and High Wycombe only. After the 1960s, lack of investment meant that the local services and the station itself became
increasingly run down. In the early 1980s there was a proposal to close Marylebone,
divert its services into nearby Paddington station, and convert Marylebone into a coach station. But these plans were deemed
impractical and dropped.
A major turn around in the station's fortunes occurred in the late 1980s, when British Rail decided to divert many services from overcrowded Paddington station into Marylebone. The station
was given a multi-million pound facelift including two new platforms, and the aging fleet of trains on the local services was
replaced by a fleet of state-of-the-art trains.
In the 1990s, upon rail privatisation, the station was given an even bigger boost when Chiltern Railways took over the rail services. Chiltern trains made the station the terminus for a new
intercity service to Birmingham's Snow Hill station.
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