page_title: Westbury railway station
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Westbury railway station / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Westbury Railway Station, seen from the road bridge on Station Road
context_page_description: Westbury railway station is a railway station serving the town of Westbury in Wiltshire, England. The station is managed by Great Western Railway.
  The station is a major junction, serving the Reading to Taunton line with services to and from Penzance and London Paddington, Wessex Main Line with services to and from Cardiff and Portsmouth, services to Swindon, Heart of Wessex Line providing local services from Bristol Temple Meads to Weymouth, and services to London Waterloo.
  The buffet at Westbury appeared in a list of "highly commended" station cafes published in The Guardian in 2009.
context_section_description: The station was opened by the Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway (WS&WR) on 5 September 1848, and was the initial terminus of the WS&WR line from Chippenham. This line was later extended to Frome, which opened on 7 October 1850. The Salisbury branch opened on 30 June 1856, whilst the opening of the line to Patney & Chirton in 1900 (along with that further west from Castle Cary to Cogload Junction six years later) completed the GWR's new main line from London Paddington to Taunton and beyond.
  In the 1880s, the station was one of the meeting places of the South and West Wilts Hunt.
  In 1899, Westbury station was entirely rebuilt to cater for the 1900 line, creating two island platforms six hundred feet long and forty feet wide. It has since been rebuilt and remodelled several times, most recently when the area was resignalled in 1985 (when the Down Salisbury platform line was lifted), but without changing the underlying form created in 1901. In 2013 the Swindon and Wiltshire Local Transport Body prioritised the reopening of this platform face at an estimated cost of £5.4m. A freight yard next to the station is used by bulk limestone trains from the rail-served quarries at Merehead and Whatley in Somerset. In April 2009 the rail-served Lafarge cement works to the east closed and was mothballed.
caption: View of the station
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