Description
Also examined are the many proposed schemes both feasible and impracticable to bring other railways to the area in particular to the ports of Southampton, Poole and Weymouth.
The involvement in the Wimborne, Poole and Bournemouth area of the Somerset & Dorset Railway was to have a profound effect on future development.
The meteoric rise of Bournemouth from obscurity to a high class holiday resort by the turn of the century was to change importance of railways in the area, by 1874 two branches off the Southampton & Dorchester Line, the Ringwood, Christchurch & Bournemouth Railway, and the Poole & Bournemouth serving the growing town. This resulted in further schemes to provide the area with improved facilities resulting in the Bournemouth direct line via Sway, and the Holes Bay curve to form a direct line to Bournemouth and Weymouth, thus virtually completing Dorset’s railway map by the turn of the century, the railway development of Bournemouth being explained in detail. These developments also saw the demise on the status of Wimborne, once the busiest station in Dorset and the reduction of part of the original main line between Lymington Junction and Hamworthy Junction to secondary status, to be known to generations of railwaymen as ‘The Old Road’.
The history of the railways of this area has never been explored in such detail before.