The Henley branch line is a branch railway line between Twyford in Berkshire and Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. It was built by the Great Western Railway in 1857. Train services are provided by the present day Great Western Railway train operating company.
The railway provides access to the River Thames and the Thames Path and is heavily used during the Henley Royal Regatta. It is sometimes referred to as the Regatta Line, and was branded as such by First Great Western and Oxfordshire County Council in 2006.
At periods other than the Regatta, many of the line's users are commuters to London, and students attending the nearby Henley College.
Route From a junction with the Great Western Main Line at Twyford railway station, the line turns north and goes under the A4 main road; the first station is at Wargrave. From there, the line crosses the River Thames into Oxfordshire and proceeds to Shiplake, the second stop on the line. Finally it continues to the town of Henley-on-Thames, where the line terminates.
The speed limit is along most of line, except for the Shiplake bridge, which is for multiple units ( for any other type of train), and the approach to Twyford, which is .
Electrification
This line is long and is not currently electrified. Electrification of the branch was announced in July 2012 and was started in April 2015; as of that time, markings have been placed next to the track where the overhead wire masts are to go and a significant number of trees have been trimmed or removed; re-signalling was also carried out during this time. This is in conjunction with the electrification of the Great Western Main Line.
It was announced on 8 November 2016 that the electrification of the branch was being delayed, without a revised forecast date.
Train services The current (2022) passenger train service pattern on the line provides trains at about 30 minute intervals off peak. The first train out from Henley is at 06:05 and the last train back at 00:18. The Saturday service is also half-hourly until around 20:15, after which a largely hourly service is operated. This is also the case with the Sunday service, with half-hourly services until 19:15.Great Western Railway timetable publicity
Additional services are provided during Henley Regatta at the beginning of July, with longer trains. All services are operated by Great Western Railway (GWR), using Class 165 and 166 Turbo diesel multiple units. Upon completion of electrification, Class 387 trains will be used, while the Turbos will be displaced to other parts of the GWR network.
History Henley had long flourished due to its location on the River Thames, and the road bridge there which formed a focus of road traffic. By the seventeenth century it was an established coaching stop, and it was only in the railway age that the dominance of the town was brought into question.Elizabeth Hazeldine, Henley-on-Thames Through Time, Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2014,
First proposals The Great Western Railway opened its main line as far as a temporary wooden terminus at Twyford on 1 July 1839, extending to Reading on 30 March 1840.E T MacDermot, History of the Great Western Railway: Volume 1, 1833–1863, part 1, Great Western Railway Company, London, 1927 Twyford was the nearest station to Henley, but customary transport routes using the River Thames continued in use for the time being. Meanwhile a number of railway schemes to connect the town were put forward, but the most realistic was from the Great Western Railway itself, and after a rejection in the 1846 session of Parliament, a Bill for the branch line was passed on 22 July 1847.From Karau, page 1; Mitchell and Smith say 27 July 1847.Paul Karau, An illustrated history of the Henley-on-Thames Branch, Wild Swan Publications Ltd, Upper Bucklebury, 1982, Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith, Branch Lines to Henley Windsor and Marlow, Middleton Press, Midhurst, 2002, Colin G Maggs, The Branch Lines of Oxfordshire, Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2013,
It is likely that the Great Western Railway proposed the branch line as a tactical measure to exclude proposed railways from what was their intended exclusive area of influence. The financial situation became very difficult in the following years with money difficult to raise, lessening GWR's desire to build the line. In 1852 the possibility of incursion by competing companies was again in evidence and the powers for construction were due to expire in 1854, so the GWR made application for an extension of time.
Interested parties in Henley were growing impatient at the lack of progress toward connecting their town to the railway network, and a meeting was held on 28 October 1852, chaired by the Mayor of Henley, at which it was urged that the railway should be built without delay. A deputation went to Paddington to press the matter with the Chairman of the GWR, and the outcome of that meeting was that the GWR agreed to build the line if the townspeople themselves contributed £15,000; if they did so the line would be built and 3% on their subscriptions would be guaranteed by the GWR.
A subscription list was opened and about half the required subscription was taken; but the local people also requested a change in the planned course of the line to run on a more westerly alignment, to enable a direct approach to the Market Place. This risked delay while the line was resurveyed, and time was already tight to achieve deposition of a Bill in the 1853 session. Accordingly it was agreed that the originally intended route should be held to. (The deposited plans showed the termination of the line as being at Friday Street, but in fact the line ended some distance south of that place.)
The railway authorised The bill for time extension was presented to Parliament and it received the royal assent as the Great Western Railway Branches Act 1853 (16 & 17 Vict. c. cliii) on 4 August 1853; it included powers to raise additional capital. The line was to be a single line, although bridges and earthworks were to be constructed for later doubling. (This was not actually done.) The track gauge was to be the broad gauge, consistent with the main line at Twyford.
Colonel Yolland of the Board of Trade carried out the necessary inspection for approval for opening, on 25 May 1857. The condition of the line was good, except that the station buildings were incomplete and a turntable was still to be finished, and Yolland recommended that approval for opening be given, subject to the use of tank engines in the absence of the turntable, and the adoption of one engine in steam working, There was a separate bay platform for branch trains at Twyford, approached by a sharp curve; there was one intermediate station at Shiplake.
Opening The line opened to the public on Monday 1 June 1857.Rex Christiansen, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: volume 13: Thames and Severn, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1981 It had cost £79,000 to build (a considerable overspend), and the local people had only subscribed £9,575. The first train was hauled by a 2-4-0T engine named Virgo.
The initial timetable allowed for five return trains daily.
By 1858 the public timetable showed seven weekday and three Sunday passenger trains each way, and by 1868 the service timetable showed seven passenger trains and a goods trains every weekday, and on Sundays four passenger trains each way.
Wooden structures There were three timber viaducts on the line: the most important was the Thames crossing between Wargrave and Shiplake; it was constructed of three main spans of 40 feet using A-frames by which the clearance beneath the truss is maximised. There were 16 approach spans between and span. It was replaced by a masonry and iron structure between 1895 and 1898.
Lashbrook Viaduct was in length; it was replaced at the same time as the Thames bridge. Wargrave flood arches consisted of seven spans; also replaced between 1895 and 1898; it was then constructed with three brick spans and from that time became known as Wargrave viaduct.
There was also a timber overbridge on the line at Wargrave Lane, rebuilt in 1894.Brian Lewis, Brunel's Timber Bridges and Viaducts, Ian Allan Publishing, Hersham, 2007,
Gauge conversion
It was becoming plain that the broad gauge was to be changed to the use of narrow gauge, later called standard gauge. The gauge conversion was carried out in a single night, on 24 and 25 March 1876.
An engineer involved in the gauge conversion wrote about it:
I found myself at nine o'clock one evening in the company of two permanent way inspectors in a packer's hut midway between Twyford and Henley. The slopes of the railway were covered with men, but all one could hear was the distant sound of an engine shunting in Henley station yard. At length there came a whistle and we could hear the approaching train, followed by a kind of roar which developed into, "Now, all together, over," with a grunt like a miner's, when he brings his sledge down on the drill. Directly the train had passed, every one was alive. Each inspector had four gangs of five and twenty men in his mile. Two of the twenty five went ahead knocking out the fastening, two pairs followed cutting the transoms which had already been marked, and two more followed the main gang refixing the bolts and straps. By midnight the line on our two miles had been slewed in from 7 feet inches to the 4 feet inches gauge, and we retired to our hut to feed and, as we hoped, to sleep. But not so; one of the inspectors, being of the opinion that if we did not keep awake we should catch cold, threw a fog signal into the fire and we promptly moved out. I then walked towards Twyford, where progress had been slower, as the line was curved and the rails had to be cut in many places. At 4 a.m. we were about again, but there was not sufficient light for an hour to lift and pack the rails, though we managed to get a train through by eight o' clock.R M Parkinson, writing in the Great Western Railway Magazine, December 1941, reproduced in Maggs, The Branch Lines of Oxfordshire
Development at Henley In this period Henley was gaining increasing ascendancy as a favourite leisure resort, and also as a residential area. This brought considerable traffic, and began to pose operating difficulties for the railway. In 1881 the platforms at Henley were extended in length, and additional siding accommodation was provided.
1890s events The timber buildings of Shiplake station were destroyed in a disastrous fire on 26 August 1891.
The main line in the area had become seriously congested, and an additional two tracks were installed, on the south side of the line. This "quadrupling" was opened for goods trains in November 1892 and for passenger trains on 30 April 1893.
In 1894 Henley-in-Arden station (in Warwickshire) was opened, and to avoid confusion, Henley station was renamed Henley-on-Thames from 1 January 1895.
There had been some difficulties with the undulating gradient on the line as originally constructed, and in 1895 works were carried out between Twyford and Shiplake to improve matters. In the same year further work was carried out at Henley-on-Thames providing further siding accommodation and extending the platforms, responding to the very considerable increase in patronage as Henley town developed as a Thames resort