Trains at: Swindon, GWML, 04/08/18

Описание: A very enjoyable but short visit to Swindon station on the Great Western Mainline where we see plenty of services from Great Western Railway.

This was my first time here and even though there wasn't much variety in traffic I thought that the station was fantastic and one that I will definitely be coming back to to spend a lot more time at.

As like many stations along this route it was built and opened by the Great Western Railway in 1842 and was originally known as Swindon Junction before later being renamed to Swindon in 1961.

The station is a fairly important and busy one where 3 lines all converge, there being the former Great Western Railway to Gloucester and Cheltenham Spa, the main line to Bristol Temple Meads and the South Wales Mainline via Bristol Parkway. When the station was first opened you would find that all the trains would stop and wait here for roughly 10 minutes at a time, this was to allow locomotives to be changed so the larger more powerful ones could run down the rest of the line towards Wales and the southern end of the country. The station was also the first of its type to hold a refreshments room, seeing as this was a first in the railway world it was something that everyone wanted to see and go into. This included the current King and Queen of the time frequenting there. In turn this suddenly boosted Swindons popularity which meant that people wanted to flock far and wide. The refreshment room actually had 3 levels to it, the lower level was the refreshment room, the middle and upper consisted of a lounge and a hotel. As you can appreciate back in those days train travel was a lot slower than its modern counterparts.

The current station and office block which towers overhead was built in 1972 following the demolition of the original station building.

Another first for the station came in the form of a ticket barrier by the end of October 1986, this soon became a sight in every British Rail staffed station across the country. Nowadays it's all automatic.

2003 saw the completion of a new platform which made things quite a lot easier for trains running westbound. Originally they had to move onto platform 3 and the eastbound or London bound trains had to shuffle across to P1. The trains that would terminate here from Westbury and Gloucester would use the bay platform which is P2. Still used to this day.

My next station is Oxford.

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