History
The station was opened by the Eastern Counties Railway on 24 April 1865, serving principally as a goods station taking agricultural produce from the nearby farms into central London. On 29 September 1949, London Underground services took over the operation of the station from British Railways when services were extended from Loughton.
Although the rest of the branch was electrified by London Underground before operations were taken over from British Railways, trains on the section north of Epping continued to be hauled by steam locomotives as a separate shuttle service. The service was operated by British Railways for the Underground until 18 November 1957, when the line was electrified and electric trains took over from steam. A shortage of power prevented the Epping to Ongar section being fully integrated into the line and it continued to operate as a shuttle service.
The entire Epping to Ongar branch was a single track line with one passing place at North Weald station, although this loop was taken out of service between 1888 and 1949, and again from 1976. Between 1949 and 1976 two Tube trains could use the branch, although they were limited to four cars in length because of the restriction on the available traction current, as well as by the restricted platform lengths at North Weald and Blake Hall. The service was reduced to one train after the southbound track at North Weald was lifted. It was therefore never suitable for heavy use, and the line was reportedly never profitable. For much of its latter years, the service only operated during Monday to Friday peak hours, and London Transport closed Blake Hall station, the least used on the entire system, in 1981. The line itself continued in use and there was a brief re-introduction of all day services in 1990. However, a system wide cost-cutting exercise saw the service return to peak hours soon afterward, with an even more skeletal service than before. The line was under threat of closure for many years, and it was finally closed on 30 September 1994. In July 1994, the cost of a single fare from Ongar (zone 6) to Central London (zone 1) was £3.90 for an adult, and £1.60 for a child, A daily all zone Travelcard was £4.60 for an adult and £1.80 for a child, Monthly season tickets were £149.40
Read more about this topic: Ongar Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)