page_title: Varsity Line
section_title: 1955 development plan: goods
hierarchical_section_title: Varsity Line / 1955 development plan: goods
caption_attribution_description: English: Diagram of the railway lines at Bletchley, UK, after completion of the flyover viaduct in 1962
context_page_description: The Varsity Line is the railway route that used to link the English university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, operated by the London and North Western Railway.
  During World War II the line was adopted as a strategic route for freight avoiding London, and additional connections were made to nearby lines to improve the utility of the route. In fact the route was not greatly used for its intended purpose. After the war the line was again scheduled to be developed as a strategic route, but this scheme too was never fully implemented.
  Passenger services were withdrawn from most of the line on 1 January 1968, and only the Bletchley–Bedford section remained open for passenger traffic.
  In 1987, the section between Oxford and Bicester was reopened, followed in 2015 by a connection to the Chiltern Main Line at Bicester, enabling Chiltern Railways to operate an Oxford to London passenger service. There are funded plans for the entire line to be re-established by the "mid 2020s" under a new name – East West Rail.
context_section_description: In the first years of British Railways, the organisation was beset with falling demand as costs increased. In 1955 a report, The Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways, was published. £1.2 billion would be spent on the project. Subsidiary reports recommended the development of the Oxford to Cambridge line as part of an outer freight ring route from Cambridge to Ashford (Kent) via Oxford, Reading and Tonbridge, keeping freight flows away from London. The cost was to be £15 million. A large marshalling yard was to be built at Swanbourne, and the Bletchley Flyover (a viaduct over the West Coast Main Line beside Bletchley station).
  Work on the Swanbourne yard and the Bletchley viaduct started in September 1958. The viaduct was ready in 1962 (it had cost £1.5 million) but work was halted on the marshalling yard.
  Gerry Fiennes was Chief Operating Officer, British Railways, at the time and wrote that he was convinced marshalling yards should be built in the areas of production and consumption, and not, like Swanbourne, in greenfield sites:
  I did stop Swanbourne, Brookthorpe and Walcot [two other green field proposals]. The Bletchley flyover remains as a memorial to those who failed to see that railways must live by concentration and not dispersal. We had … driven … a pretty big nail into Swanbourne’s coffin by refusing to put into it any East Coast traffic. From that moment the writing was on the wall. Swanbourne should have been stopped then.
  — Gerry Fiennes
caption: Railway lines at Bletchley after construction of the Bletchley Flyover
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