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Spalding railway station serves the town of Spalding in Lincolnshire, England. The station is owned by Network Rail and managed by East Midlands Trains (EMT) train operating company who provide all rail services. The station is staffed from 06:30-14:30 Monday to Saturday and offers limited facilities other than two shelters, bicycle storage, timetables, platform departure screens and modern 'Help Points'. There is also a ticket machine situated on platform 1. Other than a snack machine in the booking hall, there are no other retail facilities on the station; however local shops are within walking distance. Spalding nowadays has only two platforms.〔(Spalding Station in 2002 ); Retrieved 2014-01-10〕 Platform 1 (adjacent the station building) is mainly used for southbound services towards Peterborough and terminating trains from Peterborough, but is also used by some northbound through services towards Sleaford and Lincoln; Platform 2 can only be used by northbound services. The station used to have seven platforms - five through faces (up main & two islands) and two terminal bays, with services to March and Sleaford on the Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway, Bourne and on the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway and finally the Great Northern "Lincolnshire Loop" line to and then onwards to and Grimsby. There was also, past the Northern Junction a freight line going off to the former British Sugar plant.〔Body, p.155〕 Only the routes to Werrington Junction, Peterborough and are still in use and the station has been remodelled & downsized considerably since the demise of the March line in 1982. The bridge connecting Platforms 1 and 2 to the rest of the station still exists, but the old platform 5 has been fenced off, the bays filled in and the walk through on the bridge to platforms 6 & 7 bricked up. The tracks meanwhile have been lifted, the western island platforms cleared and the site now used for housing.〔 Though very little remains of the old station, the façade remains as it was when first built. Only 22 minutes from Peterborough, Spalding railway station is a few minutes away from the bus station connecting Spalding to Boston, King's Lynn and Peterborough. ==History== Spalding gained its first rail links to Peterborough, Boston and Lincoln in 1848, courtesy of the Great Northern Railway (GNR) who built their main line from London to Doncaster through the town; Spalding railway station opened on 17 October 1848. This route was superseded by the direct line via Grantham within four years, but it remained well used by traffic heading towards Louth and Grimsby over the former ''East Lincolnshire Railway''. The GNR subsequently added a line eastwards to Sutton Bridge via Holbeach (the ''Norwich & Spalding Railway'') in stages between 1858 and 1862, a westward route to Bourne in 1866 and another to the following year in an attempt to thwart the ambitions of the competing Great Eastern Railway (GER). These efforts didn't succeed however and the company eventually agreed to work these routes jointly with the Midland Railway (the former pair forming the backbone of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway system) and the GER (March line) by the beginning of the 1870s. The collaboration between GNR and GER also led to the construction of the last route out of the town, the GE&GN Joint line to Sleaford which opened to traffic on 1 August 1882.〔 By the end of the nineteenth century the town had become a major rail crossroads and the station had grown to reflect this, having more than doubled in size from its opening half a century earlier. It would also later become a popular destination in its own right, with the annual Tulip Festival bringing excursion trains into the town from all over the country from the late 1950s onwards. 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「Spalding railway station」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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