Most dubious railway closure cases

[D6130]

IIRC, the curve Northwards from Yeovil Junction originally led to the joint GWR/LSWR station at Yeovil Town - ending up facing towards Taunton. It was only slewed towards Pen Mill by BR following the closure of Yeovil Town and the Taunton line in the mid-sixties, presumably primarily for diversions.

 

[Gloster]

I think the line from Junction went to Town and ran alongside the GWR Weymouth line, but for many years had no connection to it. In October 1943 the two double-track lines were connected to allow through running from Junction to Pen Mill; Yeovil South Junction box was a GW ARP type. In May 1968 the box was closed and the line became single-track Junction-Pen Mill.

 

[WesternLancer]

Closer maybe but was that the major factor in driving people's decision as to whether to take the train into the city or not. I don't think so.

Well at the time (mid 1960s) there was pretty limited places of town centre work in the close vicinity of Midland station I would have thought, at least compared with Victoria end of the city. Tho this of course depends on what the profile of station users actually was in the era concerned - ie what their purpose of travel was. I suspect rail commuting of any sort was quite low in Nottingham then but I'd be interested to know from people with recollections of the era. So your point about the 'major factor' is a good one.

 

[RPI]

Reading John Heatons book at the moment of his memoirs from his days as Exeter area manager for BR in the 1980's and there was a proposal then to build a chord from the Weymouth line to enable Weymouth to Bristol services to run via Yeovil Junction (with the obvious reversal at Yeovil Junction) but was eventually ditched, seems that it came close to happening according to the book.

 

[randyrippley]

IIRC, the curve Northwards from Yeovil Junction originally led to the joint GWR/LSWR station at Yeovil Town - ending up facing towards Taunton. It was only slewed towards Pen Mill by BR following the closure of Yeovil Town and the Taunton line in the mid-sixties, presumably primarily for diversions.

It's the unbuilt southwards curve that's relevant here, not the northwards curve.
See the map on this page giving the history of Yeovil's railways

Yeovil's Virtual Museum, the A-to-Z of Yeovil's History - by Bob Osborn

An A-to-Z History of Yeovil, Somerset, England - by Bob Osborn

www.yeovilhistory.info

The missing link is the black dotted line