Reading Railway Station (Reading) | train station

United Kingdom / England / Reading
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Can get to huge number of places in UK direct from here. The station is very busy with 4 main line platforms, a 4 bays in either directions for local services. It is located on the Great Western main line, which splits at the west for the line to Taunton, then splits again at Didcot for the line to Oxford. It is the terminus of the lines to Guildford, London via Wokingham and Basingstoke. Over 13 million people pass through Reading station each year, and it is the second busiest interchange station outside of London, after Birmingham New Street.

The original station was opened here on Brunel's Great Western Railway as a normal two-platformed through station, and soon became a junction with the Berks and Hants lines to Newbury and Basingstoke. Eventually the station was built to its current size with 12 platforms. There was originally another station to the south called Reading Southern which was the terminus of the lines to Wokingham. This was later demolished and trains were moved to new platforms at the mainline station.

By the 1980s, the GWR buildings were far too small to handle the many passengers the station saw, so British Railways built a new building with many shopping facilities on the site of the old Reading Southern station (at the time a car park), as well as a new footbridge. A new multi-storey car park was also built to the north.

Unfortunately, the current station still has capacity problems: this time with trains. It is a notorious bottleneck having far to few through platforms. A planned redevelopment of the station would lead to the building of 5 new through platforms with 1 existing platform being used only for CrossCountry services.

Crossrail is a proposed link between the Great Western Main Line, and the Great Eastern Main Line. It is proposed that it will not terminate here however, it will terminate at Maidenhead to the east (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail) and this has lead to numerous complaints from Reading locals. Crossrail have argued it is too expensive to electrify the line between Reading and Maidenhead, but campaigners have argued that due to the redevelopment at the station, terminus facilities would be built for next to nothing and the patronage expected from a town of 230,000 would outweigh the costs.
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Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_railway_station
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Coordinates:   51°27'31"N   -0°58'20"E

Comments

  • I don't understand why Crossrail don't want to terminate here. Reading is an interchange for Virgin trains heading north to Birmingham and south to Guildford or Southampton, and they don't run to Maidenhead or Slough. In additional, despite the bottleneck problems, Platform 10 is an east-facing bay that is rarely used and would be up to the job once lengthened, and there's nothing stopping this from happening. In addition, Reading is being funded to sort out its bottleneck problems, and some of this could easily go towards making the platform suitable.
  • Infact, if Crossrail continued south and terminated at Basingstoke, we would have linked the line to Southampton to the Great Eastern route.
  • It's about time the GWML had proper electrification anyway.
  • In 1860 a new station building, in Bath Stone and incorporating a tower and clock, was constructed facilities would be built for the Great Western Railway. In 1898 the single sided station was replaced by a conventional design with 'up', 'down' and 'relief' platforms linked by a pedestrian subway. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) lost the 250,000-word first draft of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom at the station when he misplaced his briefcase while changing trains in 1919. Working from memory, as he had destroyed his notes after completion of the first draft, he then completed a 400,000-word second draft in three months. German aircraft tried to bomb the lines in to the station during the beginning of World War 2. In 1965 Reading Southern, the South Eastern station, was closed,nothing and the services using it diverted into a newly constructed terminal platform in the General station. A second terminal platform serving the same line was opened in 1975 for the commencement of the servicepatronage expected from Reading to Gatwick Airport.
This article was last modified 14 years ago