I must confess that until recent years I did not know that a branch railway line had existed from the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton line at Winchester to Avington Park although, like many other people I suppose, I was familiar with the beehive-topped embankment near the Victoria Hospital just east of Winchester on the B.3404 road.
As editor of the newsletter for the Southampton University Industrial Archaeology Group, I asked Charles Lewis (director of the Mid-Hants Railway) to write an article on the Mid-Hants Railway for this publication and he accompanied it with a rough map of what I was to show in the area. "Abandoned line to Avington" labelled a slightly curved line branching off the D.N. and S.R. add, after enquiring, I found this was shown in a report published in Winchester on the M3 motorway. None of my maps had the line or any evidence of it. Luckily, working at the Ordnance Survey,' have access to a lot of material not available generally to the public and I was fortunate to dig up some field plots of the early 30s at 6" scale which marked most of the course of the line as "Tk of old Rly". Any missing bits were fairly easy to sketch in.
T.B. Sands (see sources) states, referring to the First World War, "....three large camps grew up at Avington Park, Winnall Down and Morn Hill in the angle formed by the D.N. and S.R. and the Alresford and Alton branch of the London and South Western Railway north east of Winchester". Robertson and Simmons (see sources) remark "more obscure is the rail link that was laid from the D.N. and S.R. north of the Winchester tunnel to serve the camps, the junction being brought into use on 20th October 1918". Both authorities state that the line was some three miles in length.
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