Metropolitan Railway Takeover
The Metropolitan and the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company were cooperating closely by 1899. Although the line had been upgraded in preparation for the Oxford extension and had been authorised as a railway in 1894, construction on the extension had yet to begin. On 27 November John Bell, Watkin's successor as Chairman of the MR, leased the line from the O&AT for £600 (about £50,000 as of 2013) a year with an option to buy the line. From 1 December 1899, the MR took over all operations. Jones stayed as Manager. The O&AT's decrepit passenger coach, a relic of Wotton Tramway days, was removed from its wheels and used as a platelayer's hut at Brill station. An elderly Brown, Marshalls and Co passenger coach replaced it, and a section of each platform was raised to accommodate the higher doors of this coach using earth and old railway sleepers.
On 28 March 1902 the 4th Earl Temple died aged 55, succeeded by Algernon William Stephen Temple-Gore-Langton, 5th Earl Temple of Stowe. The Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company, which by now did nothing except collect £600 annual rent from the MR, pay the Winwood Charity Trust rent for their land near Quainton Road crossed by the rails, and pay Earl Temple an annual dividend of £400, remained independent under the control of the 4th Earl's trustees.
Read more about this topic: Brill Tramway
Famous quotes containing the words metropolitan, railway and/or takeover:
“In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)