New Station At High Wycombe?

A Work In Progress ...

... with a swish and big new footbridge being craned in!

Its a slightly odd station with a huge gap between the two platforms ...

... which is being oreserved in the rebuild. You might wonder why the tracks are not being re-aligned, then you could have a smlaller (and cheaper!) footbridge.  Maybe parts of the atation are being retained; ot maybe it is cheaper to leave well alone. But there used to be two through "roads" in the gap.

The station has/had a selelction of traditional signs on the platforms; one from British Railways era ...

... and one replete with buckets of nostalgia.

Sweet!

But this picture of the new High Wycombe station might well be a tad misleading.

Maybe that logo is a new design for Great British Railways?

Perhaps fbb's tease will explain itself if the old bloke explains that the railway in question links High Wycombe with the Airport, continuing via Redcliffe (a suburb of Bristol), a junction at Bayswater (London) and on to Perth (Scotland)!

We are, of course, in the Antipodes!

But technically we are not!

The antipode of London is where a straight line drawn through the centre of the earth pops out on the other side. The Antipode of London is in the very wet Pacific Ocean well to the south of New Zealand. The Antipode of Australia (a very big pode!) includes hefty chunks of France, Spain and Morocco.

But we tend to be sloppy and call the whole hugeness of Aus and New Z the "Antipodean" nations.

So, for a couple of blogs we go to Perth, capital of Western Australia ...

... where we find the urban area stretched out along the coast.

What guided your inquisitive blogger to a location pretty much as far from fbb mansions at Seaton as you could go was news of a new railway line's opening. A few weeks back the "Airport" line was opened with due ceremony and self-adulation by the appropriate politicians.

The sitz-im-leben of the new line is to serve the airport. But services will also enhance two other lines which currently both terminate in Perth centre.

Here is the Airport section.

It makes a junction with the Midland Line ay Bayswater and serves three completely new stations at Redcliffe, Airport Central and High Wycombe. The Midland line is one of two shorter east-west (roughly) routes ...

... the other being the Freemantle line/

The diagrammatic map perhaps makes this clearer. Here is High Wycombe to Bayswater and (almost) into Perth:-

And then the new service continues to Claremont on the Freemantle Line/

The Airport Line thus provides cross-Perth travel between Claremont and Bayswater where previously a change was necessary in the busy Perth (central) station.

The station is quite well hidden these days, but lies between Roe Street on the north ...

... and Wellington Street on he south.

It is on Wellington Street where you will find the original station building as seen below in a 1921 photo.

The central feature is a bit lost behind trees in the modern photo - but it is there1

Here it is the station'slocation on a street map

The main access to the platforms is from William Street, the wiggle road with the red one way arrows. From here you can look down on the rebuilt and extended set of platforms.

It is good that the railings pick up the style of that 1921 shot.

There are massive plans for redevelopment of this central area of Perth shown below in a general scheme.

The overall station roof can just about be glimpsed at the far left of the plan,

There will be more about the airport line itself in tomorrow's blog and more about the buses in Perth next week.

 Next Variety blog : Saturday 29th Oct