Aylesford railway station is on the Medway Valley Line in

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, England, serving the village of Aylesford. It is down the line from London Charing Cross via and is situated between and . The station opened on 18 June 1856. The station and all trains that serve the station are operated by

Southeastern The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each se ...

History

Aylesford was opened by the South Eastern Railway, which merged with local rival

London, Chatham & Dover Railway The London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR or LC&DR) was a railway company in south-eastern England created on 1 August 1859, when the East Kent Railway was given parliamentary approval to change its name. Its lines ran through London and no ...

on 1 January 1899 to form the

South Eastern & Chatham Railway The South Eastern and Chatham Railway Companies Joint Management Committee (SE&CRCJMC),Awdry (1990), page 199 known as the South Eastern and Chatham Railway (SE&CR), was a working union of two neighbouring rival railways, the South Easte ...

. The station became part of the Southern Railway during the

grouping Grouping may refer to: * Muenchian grouping * Principles of grouping * Railways Act 1921, also known as Grouping Act, a reorganisation of the British railway system * Grouping (firearms), the pattern of multiple shots from a sidearm See also ...

of 1923, and was passed on to the

Southern Region of British Railways The Southern Region was a region of British Railways from 1948 until 1992 when railways were re-privatised. The region ceased to be an operating unit in its own right in the 1980s. The region covered south London, southern England and the south ...

on nationalisation in 1948. When sectorisation was introduced in the 1980s, the station was served by

Network SouthEast Network SouthEast (NSE) was one of the three passenger sectors of British Rail created in 1982. NSE mainly operated commuter rail trains within Greater London and inter-urban services in densely populated South East England, although the net ...

until the

privatisation of British Rail The privatisation of British Rail was the process by which ownership and operation of the railways of Great Britain passed from government control into private hands. Begun in 1994, it had been completed by 1997. The deregulation of the indust ...

ways. On 21 October 1988, a plaque was unveiled at Aylesford in the presence of the Network SouthEast director, Chris Green, to commemorate completion of the project to restore the station building to its original 1856 condition. The project cost £250,000, £50,000 of which was contributed by the Railway Heritage Trust. During the ceremony, Green announced plans for a £4 million resignalling package for the Medway Valley line to replace the semaphore signals by a multi-aspect colour light system controlled from box. The ticket office, in a building on the northbound platform, was closed in September 1989 and an Indian restaurant—now incorporating a fried chicken takeaway—was subsequently established in the building. In 2007, a

permit to travel In the ticketing system of the British rail network, a Permit to Travel provisionally allows passengers to travel on a train when they have not purchased a ticket in advance and the ticket office of the station they are travelling from is close ...

ticket machine was installed just inside the entrance to the station, on the northbound platform. In early 2016 the Permit to Travel machine was removed with plans to replace it with a ticket machine.

Services

All services at Aylesford are operated by

using EMUs. The typical off-peak service in trains per hour is: * 2 tph to * 2 tph to via A small number of morning, mid afternoon and late evening trains continue beyond Paddock Wood to . On Sundays, the service is reduced to hourly in each direction.

Station Building

The section of the line surrounding Aylesford Station passes through what was part of the Preston Hall Estate, the then home of

Edward Betts Edward Ladd Betts (5 June 1815 – 21 January 1872) was an English civil engineering contractor who was mainly involved in the building of railways. Early life Edward Betts was born at Buckland, near Dover, son of William Betts (1790–1867) ...

, the railway contractor who built this part of the Medway Valley Line. Consequently, the station building is much grander than other country stations along the line. The station buildings are gabled and highly decorated, built in Kentish ragstone with

Caen stone Caen stone (french: Pierre de Caen) is a light creamy-yellow Jurassic limestone quarried in north-western France near the city of Caen. The limestone is a fine grained oolitic limestone formed in shallow water lagoons in the Bathonian Age about ...

dressings, in part reflecting a simplified version of the style of Preston Hall. Windows replicate those at

Aylesford Priory Aylesford Priory, or "The Friars" was founded in 1242 when members of the Carmelite order arrived in England from Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. Richard de Grey, a crusader, sponsored them, and conveyed to the order a parcel of land locate ...

. Following restoration and refurbishment, the station building received an Ian Allan award in 2001, commemorated by a plaque in the waiting room/booking office, which is now in use as an Indian Takeaway Restaurant.

References

Notes

Bibliography

* * *
Station on navigable O.S. map

External links

* {{TSGN and SE Stations, Medway Valley=y, FCC None=y, SN None=y Tonbridge and Malling Railway stations in Kent DfT Category F2 stations Former South Eastern Railway (UK) stations Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1856 Railway stations served by Southeastern