Marylebone railway station

Marylebone station is a railway station in central London. The station has only six platforms making it the smallest of the railway terminals in London, and apart from Waterloo Station it is the newest.

The station is located just a few miles from both Euston station and Paddington station, and is served by a Tube station of the same name.

In 1964 several famous scenes in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night were filmed at Marylebone station.

History

The station was built in 1899 and was the terminus of the Great Central Railway (GCR) which was the last major railway line to be built into London.

Originally Marylebone station was planned as a ten-platform station, but the cost of building the GCR was far higher than expected and nearly bankrupted the company. This forced the original plans for the station to be dramatically scaled back to just four platforms.

The Great Central Railway linked London to Aylesbury, High Wycombe, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Manchester. Also, a number of local services from northwest London, Aylesbury and High Wycombe terminated at Marylebone.

Passenger traffic on the GCR was never heavy, due largely to its being the last main line to be built, which meant it had difficulty competing against its well-established rivals for the lucrative intercity passenger business.

Marylebone had a fairly quiet and uneventful existence until 1966, when the Great Central Railway was closed north of Aylesbury as part of the Beeching axe. The GCR's closure was the single largest railway closure of the Beeching era.

This meant that Marylebone was now the terminus for local services to Aylesbury and High Wycombe only. After the 1960s, lack of investment meant that the local services and the station itself became increasingly run down. In the early 1980s there was a proposal to close Marylebone, divert its services into nearby Paddington station, and convert Marylebone into a coach station. But these plans were deemed impractical and dropped.

A major turn around in the station's fortunes occurred in the late 1980s, when British Rail decided to divert many services from overcrowded Paddington station into Marylebone. The station was given a multi-million pound facelift including two new platforms, and the aging fleet of trains on the local services was replaced by a fleet of state-of-the-art trains.

In the 1990s, upon rail privatisation, the station was given an even bigger boost when Chiltern Railways took over the rail services. Chiltern trains made the station the terminus for a new intercity service to Birmingham's Snow Hill station.