According to Chris
When is a halt not a halt? When it’s a platform. At least that was how things seemed to be when I started taking an interest in such things back in the 1960s. So, a halt was a station with a building but no staff, and a platform had neither building nor staff? That seemed logical but it simply did not fit the facts. I can only speak for the Western Region as that seemed to have more halts than other BR regions, though close to where I lived there was Longcross Halt on the Southern Region, which opened in 1940.
Though unstaffed, it had Up and Down platforms and shelters. It served the military Fighting Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (FVRDE), known to all, locally, as ‘the tank factory’. Longcross Halt was simply a staff halt for people who worked at the tank factory.
However, head out from home on the Western Region and the first timetabled location out of Staines West was Yeoveney Halt. It had originally been a fully fledged station, built entirely of wood and called Runnemede Range. There have always been numerous different spellings of Runnemede. All are apparently OK. It was built to serve the Metropolitan Rifle Ranges which opened on Staines Moor in 1892 after the closure of a range on Wimbledon Common. It consisted of a 220ft platform with a small building but following closure of the range in 1932 it was reduced to just a short length of platform and renamed Runnymede Halt. This caused confusion with the site where the Magna Carta was signed, which was actually six miles away on the opposite side of the river Thames, so the name was changed to Yeoveney Halt, taking the name of an adjacent farm.
I knew Yeoveney only briefly. I started using the Staines branch in 1962. Yeoveney was a request stop, used mainly by anglers, although I never saw anyone use it at all, and trains only stopped on request. Closed on May 14 1962 because the platform needed repair, it was there one week and gone the next. Only a blackened, burned patch and some concrete blocks remained at the site. The concrete blocks are still there.
So, if Yeoveney was a halt, I was curious to see what constituted a ‘platform’ and there was one of those at Rodmarton on the Kemble-tetbury branch. Shown in most references as Rodmarton Platform, its running-in board simply proclaimed Rodmarton. In appearance, however, it was almost a perfect GWR halt, complete with timber-framed platform and corrugated iron ‘pagoda’ shelter.
Like Yeoveney, Kelmscott & Langford Platform on the Fairford branch had been built as a station – albeit little more than a collection of corrugated iron sheds. These still existed when it was de-staffed and reduced to ‘platform’ status. On the Lambourn Valley branch, the original light railway stops, with their rail-level platforms, were rebuilt by the Great Western Railway in the style of their standard halts. Stockcross & Bagnor, and Welford Park even had Joseph Ash-built ‘pagoda’ shelters, though the latter retained its original Lambourn Valley Tramway ticket office at ground level. Welford Park had only bare platforms, and Stockcross nothing more than a shelter, yet both seemed to retain their ‘station’ status. There was, evidently, no logical definition of what constituted a halt and what was the difference between that and a platform.
Perhaps there was a stigma attached to the ‘platform’ description? Certainly, a stigma became attached to the word ‘halt’ when, in the Beeching era, BR de-staffed dozens of stations and initially referred to them as ‘unstaffed halts’. The largest of these was no less than Birmingham Snow Hill, once it became served by nothing more than a single-car DMU shuttle. The buildings on dozens of other stations were replaced by the most basic of glass shelters or nothing at all. They remained in the timetable as stations, however, with nothing to betray their lack of even basic facilities.
So, today there are few ‘halts’ on the national network and even places with the most meagre of train services and lack of facilities still qualify as stations. Indeed, even those which, historically, were halts, such as Sandplace on the Looe branch and Combe in Oxfordshire, no longer have the ‘halt’ suffix. However, it seems that Combe’s near-namesake on the Looe branch, Coombe Junction Halt, is actually allowed to be a halt, perhaps to help distinguish it from the Oxfordshire ‘halt’ that isn’t. The wooden shelter at Combe was demolished many years ago and it is nothing more than a platform!
Modelling diary: Chris Leigh
Just when you think you’re on top of things, 20ft of ancient stone wall collapses in the rain…
…the difference between a station, a halt and a platform has become a bit blurred.
So, a halt was a station with a building but no staff, and a platform had neither building nor staff?