Swindon Parkway

[whole diary]

[Bmblbzzz]

Post was being sent by train till the late 1980s, wasn't it? I don't suppose that was a huge tonnage but it might have accounted for a bit more revenue.

[eightonedee]

If I recall correctly the postal trains ran well into the  current century. I am pretty certain that there were still Post Office trains at Platform 9 at Reading when I started commuting by train again in 2001. This was also the platform where locomotives ran around their trains on the south coast to the Midlands and north trains that became (or had just become) Cross Country trains.  How on earth did they fit them all into the old station?

[eightonedee]

Just checked on Wikipedia- they ran until January 2004.

End of thread drift.....

[Robin Summerhill]

Has anyone ever seen an equivalent graph of goods traffic for the whole of railway history? I went looking for one, and could only find one from the start to around 1900, and another from 1983 on. Between those two dates the gross tonnage shifted fell from over 500M tons to about 150M tons. As so much of that latterly was coal and other bulk commodities, I'm sure revenue fell by a lot more. It was the small loads (wagonload, part-load and parcels) that pretty much vanished due to the influx of lorries after WW1.

Probably some avid researcher or three has done a book on it.

They may well have, and the decline certainly started after WW! when the War Ministry were selling off surplus equipment, and so many men had learned to drive during that war.

In essence, Beeching threw in the final towel on wagonloas traffic when it became clear that it was costing far more to move the remnants of it than the railways got in the rates they received for carrying it.

[Robin Summerhill]

I know there was a signal box at Hay Lane, but I was not aware that there was ever a station there.  It is now well positioned on the edge of West Swindon, near to the proposed new western part of the new Wichelstowe development and next to Jn 16 of the M4, but before 1970 it would only have been near a few scattered farms. 

If I remember the history books correctly, it had a brief existence as a terminal station when the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) was being built westwards from Swindon. It didn't survive after the onward extension to Wootton Bassett and beyond.

[infoman]

Adam Crozier was in charge of Royal Mail  from 2003 to 2010 when profits increased dramatically.