page_title: Wimbledon and Sutton Railway
section_title: Opening and Operation
hierarchical_section_title: Wimbledon and Sutton Railway / Opening and Operation
caption_attribution_description: Rail Junction west of Sutton Station.
context_page_description: The Wimbledon and Sutton Railway was a railway company established by an Act of Parliament in 1910 to build a railway line in Surrey from Wimbledon to Sutton via Merton and Morden in the United Kingdom. The railway was promoted by local landowners hoping to increase the value of their land through its development for housing. It was initially planned that services on the railway would be operated by the London Underground's District Railway by an extension of its existing service from Wimbledon.
  Delays in finding the funding, opposition from the two mainline companies that the line was intended to connect, and World War I, led to the start of construction work being delayed until 1927. The line was completed and opened in January 1930, although the planned extension of the DR was not implemented and the service was provided by the Southern Railway. The opening of the line stimulated residential development as planned, but competition from the London Underground's City and South London Railway, which had its terminus at Morden, meant that the line did not achieve the hoped-for passenger numbers.
context_section_description: Work from Wimbledon to South Merton was completed quickly, so that services could begin running as a single-track operation on 7 July 1929. The remainder of the line opened on 5 January 1930, more than forty-five years after the first Wimbledon to Sutton link was proposed.
  As hoped by the original promoters, the opening of the line stimulated the construction of new areas of private and public residential development throughout the 1930s, although large areas remain as parks and playing fields. The St. Helier Estate was completed in 1936. The opening of the Wimbledon to Sutton line and the C&SLR led the population of the parish of Morden, previously the most rural of the areas through which the lines passed, to increase from 1,355 in 1921 to 12,618 in 1931 and 35,417 in 1951.
  Ordinary ticket sales from Morden South station increased from 9,840 in 1930 to 50,817 in 1938 but, from the SR's perspective, the line was not a great success. The service, originally operating from West Croydon to Holborn Viaduct station in Central London, was slow and indirect and many of the potential passengers from the line's catchment area continued to use the buses and tube route via Morden.
  Goods services operated on the line, to a goods yard at St. Helier station, until it was closed in 1963, and to an Express Dairies bottling plant adjacent to Morden South station, which opened in 1954 and closed in 1992.
  The line is now called the St Helier Line, and forms part of the Sutton Loop, served by trains from Thameslink and Southern.
caption: The junction of the St Helier line (right) with the Epsom line (left), showing the steep incline at this point
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