Amersham Station - History

History

The station was opened on 1 September 1892 as part of the Metropolitan Railway (Met) extension from Chalfont Road (now Chalfont & Latimer) to Aylesbury. On 12 March 1922, its name was changed to "Amersham & Chesham Bois", but the original name was restored during 1937. It is located on Station Approach, Amersham.

From 1899, the Great Central Railway served the station through its extension to Marylebone. Consequently, the station became joint Met/GCR owned. On 1 January 1923, the GCR became part of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) as part of the Railways Act 1921, and on 1 July 1933, the Met became part of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), thus becoming the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground. On 1 January 1948, the LNER was nationalised, its share of the station initially coming under the control of the Eastern Region of British Railways, before being transferred to the London Midland Region in 1958.

In 1959/60, the tracks from Rickmansworth to Amersham were electrified, partially fulfilling plans first proposed some thirty years earlier. The rolling stock ordered by London Underground as part of this project, the A60 stock, is named after Amersham.

When the sectorisation of British Rail took place in 1982, services to Aylesbury on what had by now become the London to Aylesbury Line came under the operation of Network SouthEast. Following the privatisation of British Rail in the mid-1990s, these services have been provided by Chiltern Railways.

From December 2010, off-peak Metropolitan line services to and from Amersham were reduced to two per hour, simultaneously with a corresponding increase in through services on the Chesham branch. This is a return to the historically normal frequency of two Metropolitan trains per hour from the four Metropolitan trains per hour service that had been operating for the previous five years. When the Chiltern Railways services are included, Amersham still has four trains an hour to London in total, with extra trains from both operators in the peak. The new timetable on the Metropolitan line means that services are divided 50:50 between Amersham and Chesham. This is expected to divide park-and-ride or kiss-and-ride motorist users more evenly between the two stations and help spread the load on local roads, though the original reason for making the change was dictated by purely operating considerations.