uh good morning everybody uh say good morning rebecca morning um beard be emergency
level four i'm gonna say dragon level four possibly more emergency it's got cold I don't even
really have back yeah it got cold today right um welcome to every disused station number 35
uh welcome to every shoe station from the banbury and cheltenham direct railway i think it's called
lots to see today so enjoy the video
this is riveting youtube content as we approach the southern portal we know how to entertain you
of the tunnel we do know how to entertain them don't be rebecca oh this looks funky down here
so where exactly are we in the world today you join us exploring a line that after a lot of
evolution intended to connect banbury down to cheltenham we'll get to the messy complexes at
some point but for the meantime in today's video we are exploring the eastern end of this line
now i'll say easton as we split this video into two as there is quite a lot for you to see
so you join us on the banbury 2 kingdom section of the line now kings sutton is
on the cherwell valley main line which forms part of the route that cross country use today
our abandoned line peeled off just south of here and started its journey
west to the first stop of the day which was adderbury
so adderbury itself is where the line started on its eastern side and the station itself is a bit
of a driveway for us because it's just a bit of an old industrial estate but we've had a little
bit of old track bed where we can probably get up to and have a bit of a nose around
looks like a bit of a kids um kind of an area where you'd bring your bmx's and stuff like that
as i'll probably um point out an extremely well presented graphic shortly on screen
um this part of the line was obviously built think it's one of the last parts to be built
apart from the flyover kingdom but the whole line was due to uh sort of connect um this
area of the country which is rich in ironstone and you can tell that from all the buildings
down to south wales that was a whole intention of the line but over quite a long period of time
we'll come to more on that history as we um traipse down towards kingdom just to point out
a week ago we were in the garden like sunbathing yesterday sunglasses yesterday we were in the back
garden pretty much sunbathing and now it's snowing it's actually snowing this is mad
a lot of this reminds me of the great central the big old pillars on top there
the brickwork the brickwork's the same color it's like the blue brick almost
um i think that's quite indicative a lot of this line all that was built in sections and
evolved over 50 years certainly the brickwork there looks like the great central but then
the middle parapets are actually like red brick yeah so maybe this has been repaired over time
now the next section of line was milton halt which we have passed before in another video looking for
an old good shed but before we do that we're going to have a quick look at this embankment
okay we're done looking yeah we looked what's next
you're so funny so it was on to the next section of line at bloxham oh we've gone from really
hard round perfect snow to now fluffy proper snacks though and the hats come out i'm afraid
station is probably just i know 3 400 yards that way um and it's now just a new housing estate
so not very exciting track bed down here is is deep in water and in front of us right now is
um quite a nice looking bridge but it's just been filled in and the other side they're cutting the
other side of the bridge is obviously just filled in too this bit has obviously been left open but
it's just like a pit of stagnant water isn't it horrible isn't it this is at least what we can
do is just fill a bridge in and don't look after the place yeah disappointing really so um blocks
them sort yourself out over there is the railway banbury gentleman direct railway just to our left
is hook norton so we've just come out of north uh which is very nicely lovely isn't it yeah it's all
very iron stone you can tell the colour of the soil can you it's all that kind of lovely red
anyway so we're now trying to find the hook norton viaducts before we head north to the tunnels so
hope norton viaducts were a still topped masonry pillared uh wonderful structures and i don't think
that i'm pretty sure the steel top doesn't exist anymore um but the masonry most of it does yes
so if you're approaching or using the line as we are you're coming from banbury king sutton
towards chipping norton um this is the first viaduct you would have approached the first
sizable viaduct shall we say and yeah all the masonry is left here very beautiful um i wonder
if it was not local because it doesn't look like all the iron stone houses do around here
all that kind of colour certainly looks um it's a bit more generic masonry
love how kind of nature finds its way to just groove into um yeah all the masonry here and the
same as the same as this part here that it just kind of goes in and out with every single masonry
block here's a question for all you uh masonry and bridge and tunnel experts out there is this
sort of where they would stick with dynamite um well that's a dynamic with the gunpowder
to blow these blocks out of their original um housing so they can make blocks like this
because every single one seems to have some kind of hole in it or something like this in it
if you look through there I'll do another shot you can see
the all the stanchions the pillars for the the Hook Norton second or the southern viaduct
we're now going to head that way towards the tunnels as a few more things along the way
so in some ways in my head this line was always doomed to failure after a time
because its initial purpose was to transfer iron stone from sort of this neck of the woods the sort
of the market harbour that side of the country Nottingham and south all across to southern wales
you can almost surmise that perhaps that was half the reason this didn't survive a lot of
rural traffic there's a lot of villages along the line but that's probably about it so you can sort
of understand why the the demise of this line came about next up we've got some tunnels unfortunately
you're gonna have to watch another video for the tunnels because the tunnels are pretty epic here
um so there's really clickbait is it it's just a
tease to the next video people with the tunnels there's three tunnels
this is more of a sweeping cutting it's more like the whole the great central kind of
long sweeping cutting although single track only probably never really designed ever to
be double tracked because you'd never make it double track would you wouldn't manage to
do that well but often often they made the lines enough wide enough but i never had one but this
one is like well one track only so whether it's aspirations were small in the first place perhaps
All right so we're just walking along this this is the Pauline flick nature reserve which
is fantastic because this obviously is not a um proper bridal way or footpath it's a permissive
pathway but people the locals have obviously set this up and highlighted all the different species
and all the different wildlife when the railway track was pulled up to the ornithological society
that's really good and that means no one can probably buy up and put their garden on it or
house or something god we didn't mention great where where even are we wait
i'm rubbish at names when it comes to places it's great like rock lift
anyway you can't get there because it's completely gone at someone's farm
but we've just taken a snap as our count for every district station has a tick
unfortunately it turns out that chipping Norton is now a travis perkins
but on the plus side we did find a couple of lovely old pictures from his heyday
next up was Sarsdan holt sadly not accessible here either but it does tell a really curious story
located close to the village of churchill as opposed to the sarsdan estate it turns out that
a chap called James langston mp own at the time owned much of the land here including the sarsdan
estate he was a prominent backer of the line and knowing much of the traffic was lightly destined
for the estate itself combined with the fact that there was already a churchill station in place
likely contributed to its namesake onwards to the abandoned platforms at kingham
right we're on the um kind of the abandoned platform of kingdom it's the end of our journey
today and just down in the hedgerow there you can see the old platforms where the line would go off
towards banbury ahead of us looking north you'd have seen the flyover which was built I think
1906 has like the last thing to be built on this line which kind of connected the whole of
the line together so instead of coming in and out of kingdom station they would then be able to go
directly over and I think the first train ran from Newcastle to barrie direct in 1906. and express
train all the way through which was good great for the line of course but it was never going to
be was it um so anyway so here is obviously the abandoned part of the kingdom platform and that
marks the end of today's journey so from kingdom station we bid you farewell we will be doing part
two of this so from kingdom down to Cheltenham as a separate video a separate story um and obviously
we'll be doing the tunnels as a separate video too so there'll be free videos from this line
so from the um Banbury Cheltenham direct railway we bid you farewell and we'll see you next time
you