Marylebone station
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Marylebone station or London Marylebone station is a National Rail and London Underground station in central London. The station is located midway between the mainline stations at Euston and Paddington, about 1 mile (1.6 km) from each. It is in Travelcard Zone 1. Marylebone is one of three rail termini in London not to have either a direct connection, or a connection within easy walking distance, to the Circle Line (the others are London Bridge and Waterloo).
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National Rail
The mainline station has only four platforms (although this is due to be increased to six) making it one of 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, Stratford-upon-Avon, Birmingham (Snow Hill), and Kidderminster
History
Great Central
The station was opened 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, prior to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
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.
Beeching cuts
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.
Recent history
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 financed by selling off the redundant adjacent goods yard and some land previously used by two of the existing platforms. These two platforms were replaced by removing the existing taxi road and using that land for two replacement platforms. 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. To cope with Chiltern Railways' success over the last ten years and to cope with increased passenger numbers, two new platforms are currently under construction at Marylebone and should be completed by December 2006. Additionally, a new depot has recently opened near Wembley Stadium railway station to compensate for the closure of Marylebone's station sidings and to make way for the new platforms. To highlight Chiltern's success, some services from Marylebone have also now been extended beyond Birmingham to Kidderminster.
Future
From 2007, all services to and from Birmingham Snow Hill may be operated from Marylebone and Chiltern services could also be extended further past Kidderminster to terminate at Great Malvern.
In late January 2006, a new company called Wrexham Shropshire and Marylebone Railway (WSMR), was formed. The company proposes to operate services from Wrexham (in North Wales) to London via Shrewsbury, Telford and the West Midlands, with its southern terminus at Marylebone. This would restore direct services to London from Wrexham and Shropshire.
Trivia
In 1964 several scenes in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night were filmed at Marylebone station. The station also has a degree of fame because of its presence in the British version of Monopoly.
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London Underground
The underground station is on the Bakerloo Line, between Baker Street and Edgware Road stations. Access to the underground station is via a set of escalators from the mainline station concourse, which also houses the underground station's ticket office.
History
The underground station opened on the 27th March 1907 under the name Great Central, and was renamed Marylebone on the 15th April 1917. However the original name still appears in the platform tiling.
The present entrance opened in 1943 following the introduction of the escalators and wartime damage to the original station building that stood to the west, at the junction of Harewood Avenue and Harewood Row. This building, designed by the UERL's architect, Leslie Green, and which had used lifts to access the platforms was eventually demolished in 1971.
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