Swindon other island

[mr_jrt]

Having taken a jaunt along the Great Western recently I took a look at the NLS to look for explanations for a few unusual things I saw on my travels, one of which was the unusual layout of Swindon station, which being one of the major hubs of the GWR, I found a bit perplexing. I read about platform 4 being added in the early 2000s, but assuming that was a reopening I couldn't fathom why the GWR would have built the station like that. The NLS maps answered my queries, showing to the south there used to be a second large island, much like the current one, and the "new" platform was built facing a former loop/through line. There is no explicit mention of the missing island on the wiki page though, and therefore nothing about how the old platforms were used.

I presume it was demolished in the 1970s when most of rest of the station was, can anyone confirm why such a huge rationalisation was performed here at such a major station? Surely keeping separate up and down islands wouldn't seem to have incurred too much additional maintenance given a footbridge was still needed to reach the remaining island? It's not even like the freed up land has been used for redevelopment, it's all just parking.

 

[Falcon1200]

My first ever visit by train to Swindon was in 1971, when the former Down island was being demolished. The rationalisation did presumably save BR money in maintenance and staffing costs, but it also meant that every Down stopping train towards Wootton Basset had to cross the Up line twice! Eventually the performance implications of this led to a new platform, on the Down main line, being opened in 2003.

 

[Taunton]

It was a bizarre thing to do, as at the time a significant number of expresses were nonstop at Swindon and stopping Down trains had to cross the layout twice. Subsequently as almost all the service did stop at Swindon both ways, round the island, the conflicts, apart from with freight etc, did diminish. Due to the lengthy distance in advance of the platform that the down signals were placed, presumably to avoid changing them, plus approach control, someone writing to Modern Railways at the time worked out just how much performance impact this had on Down stopping expresses.

The same year the central island platform at Taunton was closed, although not demolished like Swindon, just locked off and theoretically still available for emergency use, though I never saw it. Again, in recent times that was all reinstated. Someone must have had a budget that was charged by the number of platforms.

It's instructive to consider just how many of the 1970-era "rationalisations" of the onetime Western Region have been reinstated - lines singled, then redoubled; station entrances closed, then reopened (Taunton again), and others.

 

[30907]

Was not the Down side at Swindon repurposed for parcels traffic, or did that never happen?

Bearing in mind the offpeak stopping service back in early the 70s (pre HST about 1 per 2hr on each main route, plus the occasional Cheltenhams, rationalising facilities made sense as well as allowing easy interchange with the branch.

And of course the notorious refreshment rooms had long gone

 

[Taunton]

The Down platform did appear to be still used for parcels/mail/news traffic, as it always had, but now only for dedicated trains, not from the van of passenger services. I recall that it seemed filled with handling equipment and BRUTEs.

 

[pdeaves]

The current platform 4 is one track north of the old parcels platform; it's not really the same platform (partially overlapping sites, though).

 

[edwin_m]

The Western seemed particularly keen on this sort of scheme - they did something similar at Gloucester and many of their branch line termini were cut back so the sites could be sold off.

 

[The exile]

The Western seemed particularly keen on this sort of scheme - they did something similar at Gloucester and many of their branch line termini were cut back so the sites could be sold off.

And effectively at Newport- though there of course the entrance was on the nearly disused platform.

 

[Taunton]

The Western seemed particularly keen on this sort of scheme - they did something similar at Gloucester and many of their branch line termini were cut back so the sites could be sold off.

There was a government/ministry scheme at the time called "Track Rationalisation Grants", which was a payment for reducing the infrastructure, it having been noted that there was a lot of redundant track and assets left lying, because the scrap value wasn't worth the cost of removal. My hunch is that these station reduction schemes qualified in some way in the form that the legislation had been written, but that Paddington was keener than others to apply it to station platforms at significant stations, and to track that was still in use for singling schemes and the like.