Brill Tramway - London Transport

London Transport

The train services provided on the Brill branch of the Met. & GC Joint Line have resulted in a loss of roundly £4,000 per annum. The traffic was exceedingly light; the total number of passenger journeys in the year being 18,000, or fewer than 50 a day. The annual goods and mineral traffic amounted to some 7,600 tons only, representing about 20 tons per day. There has been no development in the traffic, and as, owing to its volume, it seemed quite feasible for it to be dealt with by means of road conveyance, the Board and the LNER jointly took steps to give notice for the closing of this branch line.

On 1 July 1933 the Metropolitan Railway, along with London's other underground railways aside from the short Waterloo & City Railway, was taken into public ownership as part of the newly formed London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB). Thus, despite Brill and Verney Junction both being over 50 miles (80 km) and over two hours travel from the City of London, the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad and the former Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway became parts of the London Underground network. The locomotives and carriages were repainted with London Transport's Johnston Sans emblem.

By this time, the route from Quainton Road to Brill was in severe decline. Competition from the newer lines and from improving road haulage had drawn away much of the tramway's custom, and the trains would often run without a single passenger. The A Class locomotives were now 70 years old, and the track itself was poorly maintained. Trains once again were regularly derailing on the line.

Frank Pick, Managing Director of the Underground Group from 1928 and the Chief Executive of the LPTB, aimed to move the network away from freight services, and to concentrate on the electrification and improvement of the core routes in London. He saw the lines beyond Aylesbury via Quainton Road to Brill and Verney Junction as having little future as financially viable passenger routes, concluding that at least £2,000 (about £100,000 as of 2013) per year would be saved by closing the Brill branch.

On 1 June 1935 the London Passenger Transport Board gave the required six months notice to the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company that it intended to terminate operations on the tramway.