Suburban Lines
The L&SWR was the second British railway company to begin running what could be described as a modern 'commuter' service after the London and Greenwich Railway which opened in 1836. In 1838 the L&SWR had built a station on its original Southampton main line to serve Kingston upon Thames. The corporation of Kingston objected to the railway and so the station was sited 1.5 miles (3 kilometres) from the town itself. The success of the railway and the easy and fast travel into London that it offered meant that new housing developments began to spring up, first around the station and then on the road between the station and Kingston proper. The new settlement was named Surbiton (after a farm that had previously been in the area) after a brief period of being known as Kingston-on-Railway. This new settlement attracted affluent workers from The City who could live outside the city centre (with its attendant noise, pollution and overcrowding) and yet easily travel to work. The traffic from Surbiton grew to such an extent that the L&SWR soon provided a branch into Kingston itself, thus forming Britain's first suburban railway network on a mainline railway. Soon special trains and ticketing arrangements were being put in place to cope with the heavy twice-daily traffic from the London outskirts to Waterloo.
Read more about this topic: London And South Western Railway
Famous quotes containing the words suburban and/or lines:
“The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but I
could not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not
arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the
sentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a very
good beginning.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)