Rudgwick railway station

Rudgwick was a railway station on the Cranleigh Line which served the village of Rudgwick. The station opened in November 1865, one month after the rest of the stations on the line due to objections made by the Board of Trade's Colonel Yolland following the obligatory inspection of the railway line on 2 May in that year.

The Colonel objected to the fact that the station had been set on a steep 1 in 80 gradient which he considered dangerous as it might, in his opinion, result in trains calling at the station running away back down the slope. He refused to authorise the opening of the station to traffic until the incline had been flattened to a 1 in 130 gradient. The works required were complex as the embankment leading into the station contained a partly-constructed bridge carrying the line over the River Arun which also had to be raised by 10 feet.^[1]^[2]

The Bridge over a Bridge in 2005

The railway company, the LBSCR, had no choice but to carry out the remedial works as it was contractually obliged to provide the station for the local landowner who had sold the railway his land subject to this condition. The solution which it found to the problem was simply to raise the partly-built embankments, leaving the brick arch which was under construction as a flying buttress to a new plate girder bridge which the LBSCR now set about building. The result of these works was a "bridge over a bridge".^[3]

When the line, and Rudgwick station, were axed in 1965 by Beeching, the station was demolished, leaving the trackbed and bridge in situ. In the 1980s the trackbed saw use once again by the public, this time as part of the Downs Link, a footpath linking the North Downs and South Downs national trails. A few years ago the local authority installed a viewing platform near the "bridge over a bridge" to allow the public to inspect this unusual structure more closely. On the site of the station's main building is now to be found "Rudgwick Medical Centre".^[4]