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Swanbourne is a disused railway station that served the villages of Swanbourne, Little Horwood and Mursley in north Buckinghamshire, England. It is on the mothballed Bicester to Bletchley line, roughly at the centre of a triangle drawn between the three villages. ==History== Swanbourne was opened by the Buckinghamshire Railway most likely not when the company's line from Banbury to opened on 1 May 1850, but rather a short time afterwards. It did not appear in Bradshaw's Railway Guide until October 1851. The line was worked from the outset by the London and North Western Railway which absorbed the Buckinghamshire Railway in 1879. It was subsequently extended westwards to , to a temporary station at Banbury Road and then to Oxford, opening throughout on 20 May 1851. As it passed through the parish of Little Horwood, the proposed line had been opposed by the Dauncy family, the occupants of Horwood House, who succeeded in having the alignment moved further south into the parish of Swanbourne, which gave the line a distinct curve at this point. In its plans, the Buckinghamshire Railway had referred to the proposed station as "Mursley" after the nearby village of the same name. The station, which eventually took its name from the village of Swanbourne over a mile away, was in an isolated and rural location with no habitations in the immediate locality, a situation which endured until at least 1925. It is situated at the highest point along the line (on a 1 in 214 climb), on the rise of a slight embankment, shielded on its northern side by a small spinney which is rumoured to have been planted by the Dauncy family to hide the railway line. The station's remote location did not prevent it from developing a healthy goods traffic with income averaging £400 a week. In its heyday, Swanbourne was the railhead for six local coal merchants and farmers from ten local villages, with healthy livestock, hay, corn and wool traffic flows, as well as butter produced from the herd of pedigree jersey cows kept at Horwood House which was dispatched in special containers of slate and stone to London for Queen Victoria and her household. The butter was sent via a daily milk train which departed Swanbourne each morning at 0830 also carrying supplies brought to the station by cart from local farms. The Rothschilds used to send horses by rail to Swanbourne for a day's hunting with the Whaddon Chase.Although receipts had declined by the 1930s, the station remained prosperous until after the Second World War. It had its own stationmaster until 1929 when the stationmaster at took over. Passenger traffic was less important due to the relatively sparsely populated locality. The station buildings are an unusual combination of brick and timber with small windows set at angles and a narrow entrance porch which combine to give the building the appearance of a chalet. The main buildings are situated at the Oxford end of the Down platform which left the remainder of the platform free for a number of small huts, a gentlemen's lavatory and a ground frame. The Up platform only had a wooden waiting shelter similar in appearance to one at . A small goods yard was served by a single siding trailing off from the Down line which was controlled by the ground frame operated by Annett's key. A footpath leads from the Up platform to Horwood House via a flight of steps. In the wake of the abandonment of a plan to develop the Varsity Line as a freight link from the East Coast ports to South Wales, including a marshalling yard near Swanbourne (see below), the station was listed for closure in the Beeching report which called for the closure of all minor stations on the line. It closed to goods traffic on 1 June 1964 and to passengers on 1 January 1968. 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「Swanbourne railway station」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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