The London and South Western Railway was one of the early railway companies with its line from Nine Elms in London to Southampton built in 1838-40. As the London & Southampton Railway it built the successful line for high-speed running (with a ruling gradient of 1 in 250) and the company's success was built not only on Atlantic shipping, but also on the extensions along the south-west coast to towns such as Bournemouth, Poole, Portsmouth and Weymouth. The company's name was changed to London & South Western Railway to reflect the company's ambitions in about 1840. The LSWR brought prosperity to the areas fo the South-West which it touched and was rewarded with its own success. The company became the eighth largest in Great Britain and became the senior element in the Southern grouping of 1923.
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The London to Southampton line was opened to Woking in 1838, to Southampton in 1840 and to Gosport in 1841. |
The LSWR bid unsuccessfully for an extension from Basingstoke to Bristol (it had built the line to Southampton to run through Basingstoke rather than by the more direct route through Alton to facilitate the line westwards). Parliament favoured the company which became the Great Western Railway for the project. The legislators' decision lead to intense rivalry between the two companies, particularly between Wessex and Cornwall, and engaged the LSWR in an expensive guage war with the Great Western which used a seven foot guage.
The company's high investment to push its lines through sparsely populated areas drained resources from the remainder of the company but it was to be fifty years before the company could link the remainder of its lines to the tiny Bodmin and Wadebridge line which it had purchased in 1847 - while this link was a great engineering achievement, it could never be a fiancial success.
Despite this lack of success in the South-West, the LSWR built an extensive suburban network operating out of Waterloo Station and the company pioneered the system of DC electrification using a third rail (the system later being adopted by the Southern Railway).
The Southern Railway adopted the LSWR liveries and designs for its coaches and signalling. It also adopted and developed the LSWR's 4-6-0 locomotives until 1967 when electricity and diesel displaced steam as the motive force.
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The railways cut travelling time between Dorchester and London from fourteen hours by coach, initially to four, and later to only three hours. |
The first railway line arrived in Dorset in 1847and, while there was little industry in the county to benefit from the new rapid transport, the railways had a profound influence on Dorset's development in the latter half of the 19th century. The railways helped the market towns along their lines to grow at the expense of their less fortunate counterparts and, by providing a rapid means of transporting milk, were a major influence in the development of dairy farming. The railways also helped the development of the towns of the Dorset coast as seaside tourist resorts allowing many town and city dwellers of the latter part of the Victorian era to afford summer holidays by the sea for the first time.
An Act of Parliamnet for the first railway in Dorset was passed in 1845 and the single track linking Dorchester to Southampton via Wimborne Minster was completed in 1847. For reasons of cost, it by-passed towns such as Christchurch and Poole. This line joined the London and Southampton Railway and thus provided a through route to the capital.
The Wiltshire, Somerset and Weymouth Railway was also empowered by and Act of Parliament of 1845 which was backed by the Great Western. The tunnels and awkward gradients caused the line to be far from complete when the railway boom collapsed and worked on it stopped completely. The Great Western Railway took over the project in 1950 and the line was finally opened in 1857. In the meantime, Weymouth temporarily lost its Channel Island packet service to the port of Southampton.
The Southampton to Dorchester line became part of the London and South Western Railway which engaged in a struggle with the Great Western Railway for traffic to the South-West, a struggle which was complicated by the GWR's use of seven foot guage at the time. Both companies proposed unsuccessful schemes for a Dorset to Exeter lines in 1853, the GWR from Maiden Newton and the L&SWR from Dorchester.
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The station at Dorchester remained unaltered so that trains had to back into it. A collision was inevitble and occured in 1877 causing new platforms to be built which enabled down trains to pass through. |
An agrement was reached for the L&SWR; to build a loop connecting to the Weymouth line and exercie running powers over it.
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The use of the Dorchester to Weymouth line by standard guage trains meant that a third rail had to be laid along the length of the route. In return, the LSWR were obliged to lay an equal length of third rail eastwards from Dorchester to enable broad guage trains to reach Winfrith Heath (none ever did and, after rusting unused for many years, the third rail was taken up). |
The Dorset branch of the GWR changed to standard guage in 1874.
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The Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway survived the amalgamation of 1921 largely due to the fact that is was jointly controlled by the SWR and Midland Railway. |
The Dorset Central Railway started as a branch line from the LSWR line at Wimborne Minster to Blandford Forum opened in 1860. The line was soon extended up the Stour Valley to meet the Somerset Central line at Bruton in 1862. Only four years later, a loop was built to connect the line to the Salisbury to Yeovil line at Temple Combe. In 1875, the two comapnies amalgamated to form the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway.
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The Hole bay curve to the north of Hamworthy was built in 1892 and allowed the main line from London to be diverted from from Wimborne Minster to run through Bournemouth. |
Bournemouth was little more than a tiny fishing hamlet during the early development of the railways in Dorset. As the new town grew in importance, it was approached by lines from both Poole in the west and Christchurch in the east. These were linked up in 1888.
The development of the Royal Naval Base caused the extension of the Weymouth line to Portland in 1865 and on to Easton to accomodate quarry traffic. Both sections were once open to passenger traffic.
A single-track branch was laid from Upwey on the Weymouth line to Abbotsbury but this was closed in 1952 and later dismantled.
Nearly every important market town in the county with the exception of Shaftesbury was connected to the railway system by 1862. Lyme Regis and Swanage, however, were still served by horse-drawn vehicles Axminster and Wareham. The route from Wareham to Swanage was opened in 1881. The hills between Axminster and Lyme Regis presented considerable engineering difficulties which were only tackled at the beggining of the 20th century.
