An amazing evening rush hour period spent at Stevenage station on the East Coast Mainline where we see countless services from London Northeastern Railway, Grand Central, Hull Trains, Great Northern and Thameslink with freight courtesy of GBRF.
I actually thought there would be more to tell about Stevenage but it actually hasn't got as much of a varied history as I first thought. This isn't the first station to be built here though. The current station was built and opened by British Rail in 1973.
The first station was built by the Great Northern Railway in 1850, the station was first met with a lot of hostility by some of the local coach companies in the city at the time as it would take away the business from them which it eventually did as getting around by train was significantly quicker that going via horse around the country.
The station was a simple design and in all honesty hasn't really change now, the station then had 4 platforms if my memory serves me right and when the station was closed in the mid 1900's it was moved 1.4km south from it's old location to where it is located now, this is because in the 1940's the government at the time declared that Stevenage would be one of the first towns in the UK to be given 'New Town' status. This was actually done because they were looking at ways of building new towns around a 50 mile radius of London once WW2 had finished. There were 500,000 people within inner London that the government were trying to target to get into these new towns because of the amount of damage to houses and other buildings during the blitz of the war.
What this 'New 'Town' meant that was Stevenage was to be given a new town centre which is why when you are passing through the city you can see signs leading you to the 'old town'. Because if the fact that a new city centre was to be built they also thought it would be better if they built a new railway station that was also closer to the town centre to make it more financially viable which it ultimately was.
So eventually the new station was opened in 1973 and albeit from a few small modernisation changes it really hasn't changed all that much.
My next rush hour film will be from Luton Airport Parkway on the Midland Mainline.
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