The Banbury & Cheltenham Railway

The Banbury & Cheltenham Railway
Volume Two
by William Hemmings, Paul Karau & Chris Turner
Of the many cross-country branch lines which have received the attention of photographers and historians, the Banbury & Cheltenham has remained one of the most mysterious and elusive.
It sprang from a modest 4½ mile branch line which opened in 1855 to connect the market town of Chipping Norton with the Oxford Worcester & Wolverhampton Railway at Chipping Norton Junction.
The next component, the Bourton-on-the-Water Railway, which opened from Chipping Norton Junction in 1862, had serious aspirations to reach Cheltenham. However, it took a third company, the Banbury & Cheltenham Direct, to make the outstanding portions of the planned route a reality, the Bourton to Cheltenham (Lansdown Junction) section opening in 1881 and the Chipping Norton to King's Sutton on the GWR's northern main line. opened in 1887. Even then it took the Great Western Railway, which absorbed the line in 1897, to provide the final east to west link, a flyover across the OWWR which, from 1906, allowed through running over the route without entering Chipping Norton Junction, later renamed Kingham station.
The line was used as a route for the Ports-to-Ports (Newcastle & Swansea) expresses and for one or two through goods services but, curiously, local goods services and, very largely, local passenger services operated seperately either side of Kingham.
This second volume begins with a description of the route from Banbury to Kingham followed by individual accounts of the stations at King's Sutton, Adderbury, Milton Halt, Bloxham, Hook Norton, Rollright Halt, Chipping Norton, Sarsden Halt and Churchill Crossing.
170 pages, 2004, Case bound, 11" x 8¾", 1000g
Wild Swan Publications
ISBN 1874103895