South Western Railway : Hounslow to Clapham Junction

And another in my irrelevant series of posts about rail journeys that I’ve been on. I admit this isn’t riveting content, but at least it’s a handy reminder to me of where I’ve been….

Hounslow railway station was built in 1850 by the London and South Western Railway and it feels like a rural station, which it was when it was constructed.

Even by 1900 there was little development to the south of the railway line and this is now all housing today. At the time, the station was known as Hounslow and Whitton, but this was changed as in 1930 the village of Whitton (located a little to the south of Hounslow) got its own station.

The station is located in Zone 5 along the Hounslow Loop Line, where trains start and end at London Waterloo railway station.

I mentioned yesterday about how a child was found abandoned at Bromley North railway station, but in February 1926 a deceased baby was found at Hounslow Whitton railway station, a female aged just 6 months old. The coroner Reginald Kemp noted in court that:

“People who do these things put the country to a lot of unnecessary expense, but I suppose it is done to avoid the payment of a few shillings for a burial”.

Very understanding…..

The platforms, with a bridge to the other side. There’s a ticket office with toilets in the main station building (although this is all mostly only open on Monday to Saturday mornings), but no ticket barriers, just Oyster/card touch-in points.

And here’s the six carriage thunderbolt from South Western Railway pulling into the station.

It’s fair to say that it wasn’t the busiest rail service that I’ve seen.

Although it wasn’t very busy at this point of its journey, it got a little busier as we got closer to London city centre. It wasn’t spotlessly clean as a train, but it was comfortable enough, although all a bit dated and lacking any power points which is usually a sign of whether there has been a recent refurbishment of the carriages. There were some announcements made by the driver, but they were so quiet that I couldn’t hear what was being said. I didn’t see a guard on board, so there might just have been a driver.

We arrived into Clapham Junction on time and the train plodded on back to Waterloo from where it had started. An efficient way to get into London for anyone in Hounslow and it’s probably quicker than taking the Piccadilly Underground line which also goes through the town.

Final word on Hounslow though to Chabuddy G   🙂