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The South Western Main Line (SWML) is a major British railway between London Waterloo and Weymouth on the south coast of England. A predominantly passenger line, it serves many commuter areas including suburbs of London such as around Hampton Court Palace and the conurbations based on Southampton and Bournemouth. It runs through Greater London, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset. It briefly runs alongside the Windsor and Reading Lines (the "Windsor lines") which terminate also at London Waterloo. It has many branches, including a line to Dorking, the three lines to Guildford one of which proceeds to Portsmouth and the West of England Main Line which spurs off after Basingstoke in Hampshire to terminate officially at Exeter. Together with these, it forms the core of the network built by the London and South Western Railway, today mostly operated by South West Trains. Network Rail refers to it as the South West Mainline. Much of the line is relatively high-speed, with large stretches cleared for up to running. The London end of the line has as many as eight tracks plus the two Windsor Lines built separately, but this narrows to four south-west of Wimbledon, London and continues this way until Worting Junction west of Basingstoke, from which point most of the line is two tracks. A couple of miles from the Waterloo terminus, the line runs briefly alongside the Brighton Main Line west branch out of London Victoria, including through Clapham Junction – the busiest station in Europe by railway traffic. Tourist special services to a lesser frequency use the line such as the Cathedrals Express and the Alton terminus is a rail connection to a shorter heritage service, the Watercress Line. The inceptive part of the line in the London Borough of Lambeth was used from 1994 to 2007 by Eurostar trains running out of 'London ' requiring trains in this period to have a shoegear to run off the line's third rail DC electrification, following which the Central London terminus for direct European services became . == Proposal == (詳細はSouthampton, which would have provided not only a route for commodities and passengers but one for munitions and military personnel in the event of war. At the time, Southampton was smaller than the nearby port of Portsmouth, but since Portsmouth's harbour was already well-developed due to naval operations, Southampton was chosen as it had plenty of space for development. An engineer had proposed the building of a canal, but this was turned down due to being far too expensive. In 1831, the Southampton, London & Branch Railway and Docks Company was formed, a precursor to the London and South Western Railway. The company planned to build a railway line to Southampton, but were also interested in building a line from halfway down their route towards Bristol via Newbury and Devizes. The chosen route to Southampton was far from direct, as the route had been directed through Basingstoke, then a small market town, which was where the Bristol line would have diverged from. The route missed major towns such as Guildford and Alton which would have been major revenue sources if the route had been more direct, with Winchester being the only major town on both routes. In addition, the railway was also forced to bypass the town of Kingston-upon-Thames〔(Railways South East )〕 due to local fears that the railway would damage the town's importance for stagecoaches. The Great Western Railway then proposed a more direct route to Bristol, which passed through several major towns. The GWR received approval first, with the Southampton railway receiving approval shortly afterwards. Despite the Bristol plan being made redundant, the company kept the planned route, though changed its name to the London and Southampton Railway, and later the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR). Throughout the 19th century, the L&SWR and Great Western Railway were often in competition with each other over serving destinations and frequently sought and gained permission to build railways into each other's intended territory. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「South Western Main Line」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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