Good evening! Assuming I did publish this in the evening. I probably did. This is a fairly
quick video inspired by a question I received some weeks back in the comments - I'm afraid
I've lost the actual comment, which is terrible of me, and I apologise to whoever made the comment.
People are always telling me I need to be better about that whole comment section business.
The question was, why are there so many lines running into Stratford? Which is a good question.
Stratford is a station in East London that, as of 2021, was officially the busiest in Britain. It's
overtaken Waterloo, Clapham Junction, Victoria and all those others to reach the number one spot,
and it kind of makes sense that it would be so busy, because consider all the lines running
into it. You have National Rail, both c2c and Greater Anglia, you have the London Underground,
both the Jubilee and Central lines, you have the Docklands Light Railway, two branches,
you have the Overground's North London line, recently the Elizabeth line started running
trains through from Liverpool Street to Shenfield and hopefully by the end of the year, they'll be
running trains all the way through from Reading. There's even a steam engine outside. That is a
lot of trains and, as you might imagine, a lot of destinations that can be reached from there.
But why Stratford? Well, it's one of those historical quirks. Stratford station was first
opened in 1839 by a company called the Eastern Counties Railway. Here's one of their coaches.
The idea behind the Eastern Counties Railway was to build a line from London to York via Cambridge.
This did not succeed, despite George Hudson becoming chairman of the company in 1845.
Hudson was a railway entrepreneur and conman, and aren't those terms so often synonymous
when we talk about the 19th century? His great ambition was a route from London up to Scotland
via his home city of York. Construction cost more than expected with disputes from landowners and
unforeseen engineering obstacles. In the 1830s and 40s it was usually the style for railway
companies to share routes into London and terminal stations. Building a railway in London is an
extraordinarily expensive business and back then nobody had any idea how big railways would become.
Which is ironic, because the 1840s was the decade of Railway Mania, when seemingly anyone with more
money than sense was planning their own railway line. The Northern and Eastern Railway, who also
wanted to get to York, made a deal to share the line through Stratford to wherever the Eastern
Counties Railway ended up in London. From 1854 to 1858, the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway did
the same. So you know when stupid people buy a pet because they think it's cool or cute,
and then they realise that they have to look after it for the rest of its life and they've
wildly underestimated the commitment they have to make? That's kind of what happened with the
Railway Mania. After everything calmed down, people were left with a whole lot of railways
that were nowhere near as profitable as they thought they'd be. But unlike a puppy or a kitten,
you can't just flush a railway down the toilet and forget about it, so the companies had to make the
best of what they had. Fortunately, there was a new market opening up commuters. For most of human
history, everyone except the wealthy had had to live within walking distance of where they worked.
Now trains meant that you could live miles away. Cities were reshaped. The Great Eastern Railway,
who took over the Eastern Counties Railway and a bunch of others in 1862, were quick to leap
on that. Over the next few decades, they'd build more lines. Lines to villages and towns. Lines to
connect with other lines. This map from 1914 shows what a tangle of tracks ran through Stratford.
Some of these were successful, others less so. Regardless, the Great Eastern Railway's lines out
of London became synonymous with fast, frequent and busy commuter trains. Just as well, those
were about the only trains they ran that turned a profit. These many lines and their mixed successes
were the foundation of the current complexity of Stratford. Stratford had become a bottleneck.
In 1935, it was announced as part of London Transport's New Works Programme that the London
Underground was going to take over the branch line to Ongar and the line that would become the
Hainault loop. This wasn't a very well-used line, but London Underground were going to build a new
line through Stratford that would take some of the pressure off the existing lines rather than crowd
the main line into Liverpool Street. Passengers could leap onto the Central line and go all the
way to the West End. The DLR branch towards Poplar used to be a branch of the North London Railway,
which was another primarily commuter railway that didn't do so well once tram lines and
underground railways came to East London, and the line was closed to passengers in the 1940s.
The Docklands Light Railway was devised as a low-cost means of providing transport links to
the redeveloping dock area of London, often by reusing old track alignments. This new/old line
opened in 1987. The Jubilee line is something of an odd one out. Most of the railways that came to
Stratford from the second half of the 20th century on were reworkings of already existing lines.
The Jubilee line arrived in 1999 and was an entirely new line. Like the DLR, the Jubilee line
extension from Green Park to Stratford was planned to improve transport links through the Docklands,
whose redevelopment had taken off in ways the original planners hadn't anticipated. In fact,
it was partly paid for by Olympia and York, the developers of the massive Canary Wharf. The North
London line currently terminates at Stratford, but until 2006 it ran to North Woolwich. At that time,
the line was chopped in two. Most of it became part of the London Overground, but in
2011 the bit from Stratford to Canning Town was reopened as another branch of the DLR,
this time with an extension to the new Stratford International station.
Ever since 1934, Shenfield had been a useful place to terminate commuter trains from London.
In 2015, this became TfL rail in anticipation of this route becoming part of the Crossrail project
in 2022 which at the time of recording is THIS YEAR oh my goodness. It was rebranded as the
Elizabeth line. IIt's intended that later this year the link will be completed between the line
into Liverpool Street and the Elizabeth line core section, enabling through trains from Shenfield
to Reading. The history of Stratford is incredibly complicated and I have given only a brief summary
of why it's such a complicated station, but long story short, it can be summed up thus:
first, several companies built lines through here for economy.
Then the Great Eastern built lots of branch lines that also ran through here.
Then, much of the 20th and 21st centuries were spent turning poorly thought out railways into
something more useful. But unlike a lot of stations I talk about here, this one's only got
more complicated as time has gone on, and I doubt things are going to get any simpler in the future.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this tangled tale of trains and tracks. If you did,
please do click the like button and subscribe for more, hopefully less complicated,
videos in future. I feel like I've skipped over the history of Stratford in favor of addressing
one particular aspect of its history, so maybe one of these days I should consider looking at
the station as a whole in more detail. Thanks as always to my donors on Ko-Fi and Patreon,
you are the light rail to my abandoned track bed. And I'll see you all again very soon. Cheerio!