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I quite often hear the phrase '(name of place) is a railway town', so thought I would pick the brains of the forum to see which towns you think deserve this epithet. The phrase usually means somewhere whose development and economy has been profoundly affected by railways, and seems to me to have three elements:
a) A town which developed due to railway development, or where it had a dominant affect.
b) A town whose economy has been largely dependent on the railway industry.
c) A town whose station(s) are important hubs in the railway network.

Three towns - Crewe, Swindon and York - are the ones I most associate with the phrase, closely followed by Derby and Darlington. But I'm sure there are many others. Indeed, I have read that Barnstaple was always described as a railway town, as it was at the hub of the north Devon rail network, but sadly no more. What about Scotland and Wales, do any of their towns deserve the epithet? And interestingly the town that is perhaps most dependent on the railway, London, I've never heard thus described.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Didcot is sometimes referred to as a railway town, but the real spurt to growth came more from the army and ordnance depots developed from the first world war onwards. Then again if it wasn't for the railway these probably wouldn't have happened - supposedly the site was identified by a high ranking army officer who was waiting for a train at Didcot station in 1914 and opened in June 1915.

Eastleigh was generally considered a 'railway town' once most of the LSWR manufacturing and repair had been consolidated there. 

I suppose one approach is to look at what came first, I'd probably ask the question "would this place exist - in its late 19th or early 20th century size - if they had not invented railways"?

I'm not sure about using the term with respect to Dicot either...

Paul

Not forgetting Melton Constable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melton_Constable) out in sleepy Norfolk;

and my own L&Y local:- Horwich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horwich).

I would say a) with a little bit of b), but not c).

Really had to have a railway works of significant size to count.  If a) and b) were true then usually c) followed, though Eastleigh and Ashford could be seen to contradict this (though maybe that is because there was less scope for being an important railway hub south of the Thames in the way that they were in the rest of the country. 

Woolverton, Doncaster, Lancing, ....

Carlisle and Carnforth?

Well, Doncaster was an important coaching town on the Great North Road, as well a market town for a large agricultural area including parts of Lincolnshire,Nottinghamshire and southern Yorkshire. However the decision to build the GNR railway workshops (Doncaster Plant Works) at the town instead of Boston or Peterborough resulted in a huge expansion of the town. Subsequently coal mining developed around the Doncaster area (most of it in the twentieth century) and the town's development continued. The railway was once the major employer in the town but certainly isn't any more (probably the NHS is the largest single employer), however the Plant Works is still there and busy, it seems. Meanwhile, the coal mines, in the surrounding villages have gone, replaced by housing or big sheds!

However, I would say that Swindon and Crewe are the 'true' railway towns as prior to the railway they were only very small settlements of no major significance. Derby, York, Darlington have a long history that pre-dates railways.

Newton Abbot - was known by some as Little Swindon.

Didcot's population in the 1841 census was 181.

Certainly not London; the railways went to London because it was London, rather than the place becoming London because of the railways. Similarly not Berlin, though I'm told its shape follows the railway lines in and out of it (so I remember from school geography).

Quite so a fact that the RAF used to find usefull or so I'm told  ;)

Ashford Kent with the SECR works. Still the depot for the Javalins.
Woodford Halse middle of nowhere large marshalling yard and loco shed.
March Norfolk another remote marshalling yard and loco shed.

What about all the seaside resorts like Blackpool, Scarborough Skegness etc.

Ports particularly Southampton, Immingham

Westbury?

Do many in Wedtbury work on the railway then?

From a Railway FAQ from Stagecoach (http://www.stagecoach.com/~/media/Files/S/Stagecoach-Group/Attachments/pdf/rail-industry-faqs.pdf)

That's 1 in 315 of the population. Westbury's population around 15,000 (data set about 7 years old, like the Stagecoach quote) which means that if it were at the Bristish average, just under 50 people there would work in the rail industry.  I'm not sure what the numbers actually are, though, nor how much above average a town would need to be if you want to consider it a "railway town". 

Historically, the rail industry employed many more staff.   These days, a service of (say) 8 round trips a day with a journey of 45 minutes each way requires 4 staff members on a  daily basis - double that to 8 to allow 7 day working, holiday, sickness, training, etc.; the number goes up to (say) 12 to 15 by the time you add maintenance staff, cleaners, etc ... and then there's the whole question of track and right of way care which may or may not count "against" the service depending on what else os sharing the track.  A hundred years ago (say) you would have been looking at two trains to operate the service due to additional needs of the locomotive, and slower runs with more intermediate stations, and a third crew member on trains.  Those stations would all have ben staffed ("more heavily staffed" for stations that remain staffed to this day) and a service of the same number of  trains would have required three times the staff at least.  And there were more services about (or, rather, services were spread over more lines, but much more thinly for the most part).  I started to write this paragraph to give voice to there being a difference between current and historic perception of a "railway town" but not sure where it's leading ...

History encourages me to believe that operation railway staff lived within walking distance of their base / depot.  These days, I note significant flows of railway staff travelling to work by train.  And by car too;  until we have a 24 hour railway, the driver and conductor / manager / guard of the first train need to get to it, after all, and buses operate a much more limited day than trains for the most part.  The historic clustering of rail staff into "rail towns" seems to have changed as staff disperse.

Westbury - the example I've chosen to follow up on, dates back to a settlement way before the railway came which was situated some distance from the current station / yards / operating point;it was a target destination of the railway builders - a minor one, but certainly not a spot in the countryside which Swindon was when the railway came.    But over the years, it has looked very much to the railway.   Perhaps the best judgement is not on raw data from the head, but in the heart. If a town considers itself to be a railway town, then it IS one?

They talk of the three 'R's of Derby: Railway, Rolls and Royce

That says it really - the railway is important, but not the main thing about the place in the last century.  That said the railway works came before Rolls Royce (and the fact that they ended up in two major railway engineering towns (Derby and Crewe)) perhaps indicates that the railway made Derby into an engineering town.

Derby is a City, less of this "town"!!!!

It wasn't when the railways came to 'town'! :-)

Yes Derby only became a City in 1977 (I was working there at the time, but mostly before it was a City).

So my remarks about its history relate to a time when it was a town. 

Perhaps it demonstrates that current employment is no longer a definition of a railway (or mining or steel or whatever) town, because few places nowadays have one dominant employer in the way that was typical from the industrial revolution to the 1960s or so. (And IMO this is a good thing – but that's not really relevant to this thread.)

Didcot is described as a railway town by the Independent. But then, they've got to describe it as something! (or feel they have).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/englands-most-normal-town-didcot-oxfordshire-a7654506.html

Surely Didcot is one of the most boring towns in Britain. I spent 2 hours looking for ANY building of historical interest and significance..(apart from the Railway Centre of course)

For next time Listed Buildings in Didcot, South Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire (http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/england/didcot-south-oxfordshire-oxfordshire)

Didcot has one of the oldest yew trees in the UK. OK I can see I am still not exciting you  ;D

The original village part of Didcot is largely unknown to the casual visitor because it sits in between main roads so they never go by or even see glimpses of it. There are several Grade II listed houses from the 16th to 17th centuries. And the old tree.

It isn't that far from the station; cross Station Road, go up Hayden Road by the side of the carpark and turn right into Lydalls Road and keep walking ...

This is one of three conservation areas in Didcot; the second is the group of GWR houses along Station Road, and the third is the core of Northbourne, a late Victorian speculative development built by a farmer literally in his fields just south of the turnpike, which didn't formally become part of Didcot until the 1930s.

It is the community of people living in this last area, with a little of more modern surroundings that has been identified as the most representative of the British public overall.

I work from time to time at the main employment area nearby (at Harwell) and take the bus back to Didcot at the end of the day. The bus does a nice big semicircle (or even 3/4 of a circle) around the town.  During that excursion, it creeps through the bus only section near the cinema and if you're lucky stops there for a few minutes for a change of driver.  Then in plods on to the station; as you approach the station you see the Swindon train you were hoping to catch pulling in, and by the time the bus turns right into the bus area and opens his doors, and you rush up onto the platform, you're just in time to see the orange lights go out denying you boarding of the train.   Yes, a most normal town and interchange!

Also from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-39428314:

I might argue with East Leake, which is where my ex originated from. I got to know the place quite well.

One *road* in Worcester?

It won't be doing that much longer as the top of Station Road at Broadway (*) controversially is in the process of being reopened to (bus) traffic having been totally pedestrianised for round about a decade.

(* - yes Broadway in Didcot was named after the one in New York in the mid 30s. Prior to that no one was sure which bits were called Wantage Road or Harwell Road - it swapped more than once along its length.)

Isn't this a more subjective way of saying the same thing?  ;) Though I'm sure that in practice, like the similarly maligned Milton Keynes (which I'm more familiar with than Didcot), it's actually far more interesting than it appears.

Don't knock it - it's where I live.

I'm not - just that one road don't make a 'normal' town/city!

How about Barry as a contender for "railway town"?

It had a railway named after it, which by transporting coal to the docks in vast quantity had a major impact upon the place.

Also gained notoriety for another railway feature...

Scrapyard?

Or rail served pier through tunnel from Barry Island station.