Trains at: Basingstoke, SWML, 03/09/22

A very enjoyable session spent at Basingstoke on the South Western Mainline where we see plenty of services from South Western Railway, Cross Country and Great Western Railway.

The station was opened in 1839 and was for a short time the terminus of the line running from London until the link to Winchester was opened a few years later. It was opened by the London and Southwestern Railway and became a through station in 1840.

Basingstoke is also the start of the West of England Main Line taking trains from the capital to the likes of Salisbury. Great Western trains were using the area for quite some time afterwards but they weren't using this station. They had their own station that they were using mostly due to the fact that they were operating on a completely different loading gauge to the rest of the UK at the time. GWR were running trains to and from Reading from 1848 and it would continue right up until 1932 when the station was closed and demolished all in the same year, since then they have been using Basingstoke station.

There hasn't been a whole amount of stuff that has happened at this station with the expectation of two rather unfortunate instances. The first one happened in 1993 when a bomb was left in a toilet by the IRA which was discovered shortly after a bomb scare at Reading by the same group. The second and much more disturbing thing to happen was a brief case that was left at the station which contained the mutilated remains of a male in his twenties. Reports suggested that he was sadly stabbed to death, whether or not anyone was caught and charged with his murder I'm not completely sure.

My next film will be from Hamburg in Germany.

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