Tilehurst railway station

Tilehurst
Station buildings and footbridge
Location
Place	Tilehurst
Local authority	Borough of Reading
Grid reference	SU674752
Operations
Station code	TLH
Managed by	Great Western Railway
Number of platforms	4
DfT category	E
Live arrivals/departures, station information and onward connections from National Rail Enquiries
Annual rail passenger usage*
2009/10	0.442 million
2010/11	0.472 million
2011/12	0.506 million
2012/13	0.501 million
2013/14	0.518 million
History
Key dates	Opened 1882
Original company	Great Western Railway
Pre-grouping	GWR
Post-grouping	GWR
National Rail – UK railway stations
* Annual estimated passenger usage based on sales of tickets in stated financial year(s) which end or originate at Tilehurst from Office of Rail and Road statistics. Methodology may vary year on year.
UK Railways portal

Relief line platforms; the River Thames is to the left of and below the blue railings on the left.

Fast line platforms and station entrance.

Down Hereford express in 1962.

Tilehurst railway station is a railway station in the suburb and former village of Tilehurst, west of Reading in England. The station is served by local services operated by First Great Western.

History

The station is on the original line of the Great Western Railway, which opened in 1841, and was itself opened to traffic in 1882.^[1]

Description

Tilehurst station is on the extreme northern edge of the suburb of Tilehurst, and at a much lower level than most of that suburb. The railway line and station occupy a strip of land between the A329 road and the River Thames, with the up relief platform on an embankment above the river bank.

The station has four platforms, one on each of the fast and relief (slow) lines, although the platforms on the fast lines see little use except during track works on the line between Reading and Didcot. The platforms are linked to each other and the station entrance, on the down fast platform, by a footbridge.

There is a waiting room in the middle platform which contains separate Ladies and Gents toilets. A small waiting room was built on the north platform, but although it looks old, it is of modern construction.

The Main Ticket Office on the south side is manned usually on weekday mornings but tickets can also be purchased from an automatic machine using Debit or Credit Cards only.

In 2013 the redundant Goods Shed was demolished to make way for a new footbridge. The line from Paddington to Wales has been scheduled to be electrified and the old footbridge does not have enough clearance for the electric wires to be hung underneath.

The new Footbridge was opened in early December 2013 and the old footbridge demolished the following week. The footbridge does not have lifts so disabled people still have to climb the stairs to the platforms in normal use.

Services

Tilehurst station is served by stopping services run by Great Western Railway between Reading and Oxford (or in a few cases onward to Banbury). Most of these services start or continue as semi-fast services between Reading and London Paddington, and run twice per hour throughout most of the day, but only hourly on Sundays. Typical journey times are about 5 minutes to Reading, 35 minutes to Oxford, and just under one hour to Paddington.^[2]

In literature

The railway at Tilehurst was mentioned in less than glowing terms by Jerome K. Jerome in chapter 16 of Three Men in a Boat: "The river becomes very lovely from a little above Reading. The railway rather spoils it near Tilehurst, but from Mapledurham up to Streatley it is glorious."^[3]

References

1. Waters, Lawrence (1990). Rail Centres: Reading. Ian Allan Ltd. ISBN 0-7110-1937-1.
2. Table 116 National Rail timetable, May 2016
3. Jerome, Jerome K. "Three Men in a Boat". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 14 April 2007.

External links

• Train times and station information, from National Rail

Coordinates: 51°28′17.40″N 1°01′46.20″W / 51.4715000°N 1.0295000°W