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Description: | Drawing of a train called the Caterpillar. The card was sent to Wickham Lodge from Alton of the Meon Valley Railway.
The Meon Valley Railway opened in 1903 as part of a through route from London via Alton to Portsmouth. It was twenty two and a quarter miles long and extended from Alton to Knowle about two miles north of Fareham. Plans for a railway through the Meon Valley had begun as early as 1851 but nothing happened until the LSWR (the London and South Western Railway) obtained the South Western (Meon Valley) Railway Act and the chosen route appeared as the Meon Valley Railway. It was a very picturesque route through thinly populated agricultural land and never paid any return on its investment of half a million pounds. The line took five years to build and was expensive to maintain with two long tunnels at Privett and West Meon as well as numerous chalk earthworks. The chalk was easily workable but was devoid of water necessary for the construction so that deep artesian wells have be sunk at great expense. The line had to cross the River Meon near Wickham station and after it, a large steel structure on cylindrical piers was needed to bridge the river again. South of Wickham too, a different type of soil proved difficult to work needing blasting to dig the cuttings and fluid mud when wet. With little passenger traffic, it was freight that kept the line alive, including milk and strawberry specials during the summer. During the Christmas holidays in 1927, the 5.40 Waterloo to Gosport train became struck in a huge drift at Tisted, north of Wickham in a very severe snowstorm which began at 6pm on Christmas Day and continued for 2 days. Gangs of workmen took two days to clear the line.
The line was built as single track but was wide enough for a second track to be added as necessary. The bridges and tunnels were all built wide enough for two lines. In 1937 however, the Southern Railways electrification scheme saw electric trains operating only as far as Alton and not, as hoped, down to Fareham. So making the line wide enough for a second track was all for nothing. The line was more heavily used during WW2 despite bombing raids and in 1944, a special train containing the War Cabinet stayed in a siding at Droxford to make final preparations for the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
The line closed to passengers and through goods services on 5th February 1955, though parts of the line including one from Fareham to Droxford survived for many years. Today much of the original railway has reverted to farmland and some areas, especially around Wickham have become nature walks.
References:
1. Stone, R A. 1983. The Meon Valley railway.
2. Robertson, Kevin and Oppitz, Leslie. 1988. Hampshire Railways Remembered, p. 58-64.
Copy photograph of a postcard in cartoon form, 1910. | Format: | image/jpeg | License: | http://www.sopse.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=query&p=gateway&f=generic_sitetext%2ehtm&_IXFIRST_=1&_IXMAXHITS_=1&cms_con_core_subtype%3acms_con_text_what=copyright&%3acms_sys_group=%22sopse%22 | Subjects: | building Meon Valley D-Day London and South Western Railway Wickham Lodge artesian well house West Meon well strawberry Caterpillar railway transport milk freight train River Meon Privett tunnel river | Temporal: | start=1910-01-01; end=1910-12-31; | Source: | Sense of place SE | Identifier: | http://www.sopse.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | image/jpeg | Go to resource |
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