Restoration
While other closed stations on the former Metropolitan Railway lines north of Aylesbury were generally demolished or sold, in 1969 the Quainton Railway Society was formed to operate a working museum at the station. On 24 April 1971 the society formally absorbed the London Railway Preservation Society, taking custody of its collection of historic railway equipment. The station was maintained in working order and used as a bookshop and ticket office, and the sidings—still intact, although disconnected from the railway line in 1967—were used for locomotive restoration work.
The Quainton Railway Society (which operates the station as the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre) restored the main station building to its 1900 appearance. A smaller building on the former Brill platform, once a shelter for passengers waiting for Brill and Down Line trains, was used first as a store then as a shop for a number of years before its current use to house an exhibit on the history of the Brill Tramway. A former London Transport building from Wembley Park was dismantled and re-erected at Quainton Road to serve as a maintenance shed. In 1988, the station briefly came back into passenger use, with the introduction of special Christmas shopping services between Aylesbury and Bletchley railway station. These services ran on Saturdays only, and stopped at Quainton Road.
Oxford Rewley Road railway station, the Oxford terminus of Harry Verney's Buckinghamshire Railway and of the Oxford to Cambridge Line, had closed to passengers on 1 October 1951 with all services to Oxford from then on diverted into the former GWR station at Oxford General (the current Oxford railway station). In co-operation with the Science Museum Oxford Rewley Road station was dismantled in 1999, the main station building and part of the platform canopy were moved to Quainton Road for preservation with the opportunity taken to house improved visitor facilities and the main shop and office of the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre thus maintaining it as a working building. A number of former Ministry of Supply food warehouses in what is now the extended Down Yard of the station have been converted for various uses by the Society including storage and exhibition of rolling stock.
Although the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre's steam trains run on the sidings which were disconnected from the network in 1967, the station still has a working railway line passing through it which is also used for occasional special passenger trains from Aylesbury in connection with events at the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. The regular freight services are mainly landfill trains from waste transfer depots in Greater London to the former brick pits at Calvert.
As one of the best-preserved period railway stations in England, Quainton Road is regularly used as a filming location for period drama, and programmes such as The Jewel in the Crown, the Doctor Who episode Black Orchid and Midsomer Murders have been filmed there. As of 2010 the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre are negotiating for a reconnection of the link between their sidings and the line through the station to allow their locomotives to run to Aylesbury when the line is not in use by freight trains, and to rebuild part of the Brill Tramway between Quainton Road and Waddesdon Road.
Read more about this topic: Quainton Road Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
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“Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)