Colin Boocock took his camera to record diverted trains on two weekends in 1960 when engineering work closed the Bournemouth main line at New Milton. All photographs by the author.
A little bit of history can explain: before the 1880s, Bournemouth was almost disregarded by railways. It was known to be just a fishing village clustered around the mouth of the River Bourne, a river by name but actually little more than a stream with a catchment area extending no further than the neighbouring town of Poole, thus the London & South Western Railway main line from London to Dorchester ignored Bournemouth, instead passing through the then more important towns of Ringwood and Wimborne, initially as the Southampton & Dorchester Railway. Developments later enabled trains to reach Bournemouth from the west, that is from the Poole direction, terminating at Bournemouth West. In addition, a minor branch line also meandered south from Ringwood to Christchurch and then west to Bournemouth East.
It was only in 1888 that the gap in the main line between Bournemouth’s East and West stations was filled by a direct double-track route that headed south-west from Lymington Junction, just west of Brockenhurst station, and this enabled trains to reach Bournemouth directly from London (Waterloo), a distance of 108 miles to the middle of Bournemouth Central station, followed by a further devious three miles round to the earlier Bournemouth West terminus. By that time, Bournemouth was quickly expanding into the seaside resort that we know today. The success of the direct route caused traffic on the Ringwood-Christchurch branch to fade away and it closed in 1935.
After 1888, the original main line route from Brockenhurst via Ringwood and Wimborne, the ‘Old Road’ as it was soon called, became a relatively minor byway carrying local goods trains and a relatively infrequent service of push-pull stopping trains. In British Railways days, the only through passenger trains were Waterloo to Weymouth extra Channel Islands boat trains that did not need to stop at Bournemouth. The route otherwise continued its unimportant exi
