STEPHEN ROBERTS traces a short – and short-lived – Hampshire branch which provided the London & South Western Railway with access to Christchurch and Bournemouth until superseded by a new direct main line from Brockenhurst to Christchurch in 1888.
For most people interested in Britain’s railways, talk of closures immediately brings 1960s bogeyman Dr. Richard Beeching to mind with his controversial report recommending the closure of some 6,000 miles of track, getting on for 2,500 stations and the decimation of routes which followed. I have an interest, however, in a quaint rural line that ran metres from my house in Christchurch, Dorset, which fell victim to redundancy as long ago as 1935. As railway closures go this had to be amongst the earliest. The line in question, coming down from the market town of Ringwood in the north, was the first railway to reach the town of Christchurch (in 1862), which was then in Hampshire. Extension of the line would then see it reach the aspiring resort of Bournemouth (in 1870).
As with many other towns and cities the arrival of the railway was an important development for Christchurch, although the railway did not actually come anywhere too close to the town itself to begin with. The first railway in the vicinity came to Holmsley, known as ‘Christchurch Road’, in 1847, but this was a good seven to eight miles away from Christchurch itself and over windswept heathland to boot. It was a stop on the newlyopened Southampton & Dorchester Railway, which saw a line reach Brockenhurst in the New Forest, then head north west, through Holmsley, to Ringwood, then on to Wimborne, continuing its westward journey, via Poole, to Dorchester.
The line was promoted by one Charles Castleman (1807-76), a Wimborne-based solicitor, who wanted to see the joining up of the various towns on the route (including his), which gave the line its moniker of ‘Castleman’s Corkscrew’, in honour of both its promoter (Castleman) and its circuitous route (the ‘Corkscrew’). The Southampton & Dorchester Railway company had hopes of a through route between London and Exeter, received its Parliamentary approval in 1845 and had its Southampton–Dorchester line open two years later (but with no connection to either London or Exeter). The line was worked by the London & South Western Railway (LSWR) from the beginning, so amalgamation was always likely, which duly occurred in 1848.
