Holmwood railway station

Holmwood
Location
Place	Beare Green
Local authority	Mole Valley
Grid reference	TQ174437
Operations
Station code	HLM
Managed by	Southern
Number of platforms	2
Live arrivals/departures and station information from National Rail Enquiries
Annual rail passenger usage*
2004/05	31,131
2005/06	32,845
2006/07	35,312
2007/08	41,663
2008/09	43,478
2009/10	49,198
2010/11	52,898
2011/12	53,802
History
Opened 1 May 1867 (1 May 1867)
National Rail – UK railway stations
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
* Annual estimated passenger usage based on sales of tickets in stated financial year(s) which end or originate at Holmwood from Office of Rail Regulation statistics. Methodology may vary year on year.
UK Railways portal

Holmwood railway station is a station serving the villages of Beare Green and South Holmwood in Surrey, England.

Holmwood is the nearest station for walkers wishing to climb Leith Hill, the second highest point in southern England. Walkers can use a footpath, initially shared with a dead-end road, passing via Anstiebury Farm and Anstiebury Fort to Leith Hill Tower. The path briefly is the main pavement of Coldharbour, Capel which has a public house/inn.

Services

For most of the day there are southbound services to Horsham and northbound services terminating at Victoria (via Dorking, Sutton and Clapham Junction).

In the Monday to Friday morning peak hours northbound and the evening peak southbound are an approximately half hourly service to Dorking, with a connecting service directly into alternative terminus Waterloo, which can be accessed via a change at Clapham Junction otherwise.

Timetable gaps

Currently no trains run from Victoria between the 1920 service and the 2326 service; no evening service runs on a Saturday and no service at all runs on a Sunday.

Facilities

Station facilities

The station is unmanned and does not have any parking spaces of its own, significant unrestricted parking is available on the road next to the station entrance to the two platforms. There is no taxi rank, Dorking and Horsham instead having firms in either direction.

Listed signal box

The only listed building within 0.8 miles (1.3 km) is its signal box at one end of the northbound platform.^[1]

Community's facilities

A public payphone for card payments is around 100m south of the station entrance in the car park outside the Beare Green newsagent and village store.

Journey times

Journey times vary between 59 and 72 minutes to London Victoria compared to times of between only 46 and 55 minutes for example in 1992. The 1930s timetables evidence a few journeys to and from London from Holmwood were in that decade faster than those of the 1990s (pre-electrification of the line in 1938) and prior to the removal of passing loops on the line at Cheam in the 1960s.

Historical perspective

The station opened in 1867 in what was the far north of the parish of Capel along the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway line to Portsmouth.^[2] Why it was called Holmwood is mysterious, however Beare Green was a smaller settlement than the Holmwood area which was expanding with building at the time.

Holmwood for many years had until a revised timetable of 10 July 1967 two hourly services during the day in each direction:

• to and from Waterloo and Horsham
• to and from London Bridge (via Sutton and Tulse Hill) and Horsham.

In respect of the first route where on time the journey was completed in less than 55 minutes: no slack, allowing for lengthy boarding assuming identical track speed, was built into the timetables. Of relevance to Bognor Regis, a once an hour non-stop express Victoria service went through the station from the coastal resort.

Further, Holmwood was a terminus for various additional trains to and from Waterloo.^[3]

The Grade II listed signal box

Prior to 1963 the use of Holmwood as a terminus was implemented for much of the day. For example, a serious accident at Motspur Park on 6 Nov 1947 involved the 16:45 Southern Railway train from Holmwood to Waterloo. This service was withdrawn in 1963, the later 17:45 being the last of a series of hourly trains from Holmwood to Waterloo to be retained in the 1963 timetable. The accident in 1947 resulted from incorrect manual fog signalling when the driver of the Holmwood train was given permission to enter the junction at Motspur Park before the down Chessington train had cleared the junction, and before the signals and points were changed by the signal box.^[4] This is one of the few references one can find to the important role that Holmwood station played in the Sutton and Mole Valley Lines to Waterloo service initiated in the early 20th century by the Southern Railway. Before nationalisation in the 1940s, the Southern Railway built, owned its trains, running from today's two London termini as well as Waterloo following the formation of the Big Four.

Thus the earlier timetables for services on the line from London Victoria to Horsham in 1905 and 1917^[5] show that services to London Waterloo and London Bridge adhering to the Victorian service pattern from Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham being to London Victoria only.

Some features of the unusual service pattern endure include its last evening weekday rush hour service from London Victoria at 7:20pm (apart from the 11:26pm weekday service added to the timetable in December 2004 following several years of pressure from a local campaigner) traceable to the Victorian/Edwardian origins.

From at least Victorian times (or quite probably from the opening of the line in 1867) until the middle of the 20th century the line also had four services to and from London Victoria in each direction on a Sunday compared to no Sunday service at all in current times. There were two services in each direction in the early morning and two more in the late afternoon/early evening (a total of eight trains in all on the Dorking to Horsham section of line during the day) making Sunday outings to the Capital and elsewhere possible in this still largely pre-motor car era. However it is not clear from easily available records precisely when Holmwood and the neighbouring two stations of Ockley and Warnham lost their Sunday railway services.

Preceding station	National Rail			Following station
Dorking		Southern Sutton & Mole Valley Lines Mondays-Saturdays only		Ockley

References

1. ↑ English Heritage. "Details from listed building database (376781)". National Heritage List for England .
2. ↑ H.E. Malden (editor) (1911). "Parishes: Capel". A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3. Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved 29 November 2013. 
3. ↑ British Railways Southern Region passenger and working timetables for 1966-1967.
4. ↑ http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=862
5. ↑ LBSCR timetable 'nov1805'
   LBSCR timetable 'nov1017'

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Holmwood railway station.

• Train times and station information for Holmwood railway station from National Rail

Coordinates: 51°10′52″N 0°19′16″W / 51.181°N 0.321°W / 51.181; -0.321

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