Shepperton branch line

The line opened on 1 November 1864 briefly named The Thames Valley Railway with access only from the Twickenham direction. The line was originally intended to reach a terminus on the north bank of the River Thames immediately east of Chertsey Bridge and the town itself but this plan was abandoned in 1862.[1] The line's optional curve linking Fulwell and Teddington initially opened only to freight on 1 July 1894 and first carried passengers on 1 June 1901. The line was electrified by the L&SWR using 630 V DC third rail on 30 January 1916.

'Even the railway is a quite retiring type of line, ending abruptly at Shepperton, which is not in the way of being a metropolis; and so for many years a single train ran quietly to and fro upon a single line, resting a good deal and never hastening. And it is still in this state...till the racing tap is turned on every month or so.'

— Charles Dickens, Jr., Racecourses about London, an article in All the Year Round, 1887[2]

Demand and population in the area increased after the railway's relatively late introduction. Hampton station is the line's busiest with more than 1.2 million journeys made in the 2014-2015 financial year[3] Its recorded use was 0.7 million ten years before.[3] The total of journeys per year of the six stations on the line has reached 2.848 million recorded journeys. Hampton station has formally been assigned C2 (Important feeder) status as its station category.

Stations on the line are:

• Fulwell
• Hampton
• Kempton Park
• Sunbury
• Upper Halliford
• Shepperton

Train in the railway cutting at Fulwell approaching the station. The "tunnel" is actually an overbridge.

Service on the line is half-hourly to London Waterloo via Kingston (hourly on Sundays).[4] Monday to Friday, four additional early morning rush-hour trains to Waterloo are routed via Twickenham and Richmond. Three additional evening rush-hour trains from Waterloo arrive via that route.[4]

In common with the 16 hourly off-peak ("inner") commuter services to/from London Waterloo,[5] trains must stop at every intermediate station. There are no mid-track destinations (Waterloo to Wimbledon or Kingston express services) using sidings there. The long travel time of this pattern gives overcapacity at Shepperton and Sunbury where commuters are three miles from faster track stations. It gave overcrowding to these 16 "stopping service routes" during their inner-city phases in the ultra-peak hours due to the great number of stations each service "must" serve per service, much abated by 10-car trains.[6]

Stopping-only formats contrast to most patterns of other historic railway operators in the region.[lower-alpha 1]

Footnotes

References

• Mitchell, Vic & Smith, Keith (1990). London Suburban Railways: Kingston and Hounslow Loops. Middleton Press.