Rudgwick railway station was on the Cranleigh Line. It served the village of

Rudgwick Rudgwick is a village and Civil parishes in England, civil parish in the Horsham (district), Horsham District of West Sussex, England. The village is west from Horsham on the north side of the A281 road. The parish's northern boundary forms par ...

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an ar ...

until June, 1965.

History

Rudgwick 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 The Board of Trade is a British government body concerned with commerce and industry, currently within the Department for International Trade. Its full title is The Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of ...

's Colonel Yolland following the obligatory inspection of the line on 2 May in that year. Yolland objected to the station being on a 1 in 80

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p is the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gradi ...

, which he considered dangerously steep as it might, in his opinion, result in trains calling at the station running away back down the slope. (In 1865

continuous brakes A railway brake is a type of brake used on the cars of railway trains to enable deceleration, control acceleration (downhill) or to keep them immobile when parked. While the basic principle is similar to that on road vehicle usage, operational f ...

for railway trains did not yet exist.) He refused to authorise the opening of the station to traffic until the incline had been reduced to a 1 in 130. The works required were complex as the

embankment Embankment may refer to: Geology and geography * A levee, an artificial bank raised above the immediately surrounding land to redirect or prevent flooding by a river, lake or sea * Embankment (earthworks), a raised bank to carry a road, railwa ...

leading into the station included a partly built bridge carrying the line over the

River Arun The River Arun () is a river in the English county of West Sussex. At long, it is the longest river entirely in Sussex and one of the longest starting in Sussex after the River Medway, River Wey and River Mole. From the series of small stream ...

, which had to be raised by . Rudgwick Double Bridge

The railway company had no choice but to carry out the remedial works as it was contractually obliged to provide the station; the local landowner had sold the railway his land subject to this condition. The solution was to raise the partly built embankments, leaving the brick arch which was under construction as a

flying buttress The flying buttress (''arc-boutant'', arch buttress) is a specific form of buttress composed of an arch that extends from the upper portion of a wall to a pier of great mass, in order to convey lateral forces to the ground that are necessary to pu ...

to a new

plate girder bridge A plate girder bridge is a bridge supported by two or more plate girders. Overview In a plate girder bridge, the plate girders are typically I-beams made up from separate structural steel plates (rather than rolled as a single cross-section), w ...

which the LBSCR now set about building. The result of these works was a "bridge over a bridge". The line at the station was single track. The station had a single platform with a shelter and a small goods yard centred on a wagon turntable. At the southern end of the station was a road bridge (now Church Street B2128) leading to the nearby Marlet Hotel. The line was closed in 1965 following '' The Reshaping of British Railways'' report of 1963, and afterwards the station was demolished leaving the trackbed and bridge in situ. In the 1980s the trackbed was made part of the

Downs Link The Downs Link is a footpath and bridleway linking the North Downs Way at St. Martha's Hill in Surrey with the South Downs Way near Steyning in West Sussex and on via the Coastal Link to Shoreham-by-Sea. History For much of its route, ...

, a footpath linking the

North Downs The North Downs are a ridge of chalk hills in south east England that stretch from Farnham in Surrey to the White Cliffs of Dover in Kent. Much of the North Downs comprises two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs): the Surrey Hills a ...

and

South Downs The South Downs are a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, in the Eastbourne Downland Estate, East Sussex, in the east. ...

National Trails National Trails are long distance footpaths and bridleways in England and Wales. They are administered by Natural England, a statutory agency of the UK government, and Natural Resources Wales (successor body to the Countryside Council for Wa ...

. 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. Rudgwick Medical Centre has been built on the site of the station's main building.History of Rudgwick
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Other stations

Guildford Guildford () is a town in west Surrey, around southwest of central London. As of the 2011 census, the town has a population of about 77,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford, which had around inhabitants in . The name "Guildf ...

* * * * * *

References

External links

Rudgwick station on Subterranea Britannica
{{coord, 51.0897, -0.4509, type:railwaystation_region:GB, display=title Disused railway stations in West Sussex Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1865 Railway stations in Great Britain closed in 1965 Beeching closures in England Former London, Brighton and South Coast Railway stations 1865 establishments in England 1965 disestablishments in England

History

Other stations

See also

References

External links