Today, everyone knows Sudbury as having two stations on the Piccadilly Line and two less-favoured stations a short distance away on the Chiltern route. How did this situation come about?  The story isn’t as straightforward as you might expect, and has as much to do with railway rivalries and disagreements as with more obvious issues.

Generally speaking, the main line railway companies developed their networks into and around London first, followed somewhat later by the London Underground, but in Sudbury’s case the opposite occurred.  First to venture into this then still-rural, largely wooded area was the Metropolitan District Railway (MDR), with an eye on its development potential for London’s steadily-expanding suburbs. Having reached Ealing in 1879, the company set its sights on Harrow, Uxbridge and even High Wycombe. Various schemes were proposed and rejected, with the Great Western Railway particularly determined to protect its territory. Eventually, in 1894, the MDR gained Parliamentary assent to build the Ealing & South Harrow Railway, but further wrangling meant that construction did not begin until 1899, the line being completed in 1901 (rather faster than new lines take to build nowadays!). 

Around this time the District (by now in a dire financial state) was taken over by the American railway entrepreneur and financier Charles Tyson Yerkes, whose Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company decided to electrify the whole system using the Ealing & South Harrow line as its test bed. The newly-electrified line opened to South Harrow at the end of June 1903, and by 1910 District trains were running through to Rayners Lane and Uxbridge. Sudbury Town station looked very different then from the way it does today, and just had a primitive single-storey corrugated-iron station building. A poster at the entrance enticed passengers with the message “Underground to Anywhere – Quickest Way, Cheapest Fare”. The line wasn’t exactly over-busy at first – in 1906 offpeak trains were single-car and all intermediate stations except Alperton were request stops! At its eastern end, the service terminated at Acton Town or South Acton (via a long-closed connecting curve), generally only running through to Central London in rush hours. The line even had Sunday pleasure-excursion traffic outwards from London, particularly to South Harrow for the Roxeth fields and sports grounds. Suburban development of the area got off to a slow start, but the area between the line’s two Sudbury stations became largely built up between 1930 and 1936.

With rising commuter demand putting the District Line route into Central London under increasing pressure, it was decided to extend Piccadilly Line trains to South Harrow instead, and these began running out to there in 1932, replacing the District service over that section.  By now Sudbury Town’s annual usage had leapt from about 60,000 to almost 1,300,000, and it was chosen for the prototype of a new type of surface station in the Modernist style, designed by Charles Holden. These stations became regarded as some of the finest examples of British public building in the inter-war years – Sudbury Town station is now Grade II* listed and has been preserved largely intact, including its original wooden Passimeter ticket office. Sudbury Hill was rebuilt in similar style in 1932, and again has survived largely unaltered. However, the step down from platforms to trains, and the fact that the bridge clearances are far higher than the Piccadilly trains need, are reminders that the line was originally built to accommodate the much bigger District Line rolling stock – and freight traffic too.

Meanwhile, a little further north, the Metropolitan Railway had been developing its route from Central London out to Harrow-on-the-Hill, Amersham, Aylesbury and beyond, with aspirations to become a fully-fledged main line. Originally the world’s first underground urban railway, running from Farringdon to Baker Street with a single-track extension to Swiss Cottage, it became much more ambitious under its chairman Sir Edward Watkin, who had visions of a grand trunk railway route from the North and the Midlands to Dover and thence to Europe (he was also chairman of the Channel Tunnel Company). He planned to achieve this by means of a mixture of newly-built and existing lines, and by 1897 Metropolitan trains were running out to Chesham, Aylesbury and beyond to the rural outposts of Quainton Road, Verney Junction and Brill. Meanwhile, the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway – also under Watkin - was heading south through the heart of the country to join up with it north of Aylesbury at Quainton Road, sharing the Metropolitan’s tracks from there into London where it diverged off to its own terminus at Marylebone. Opening throughout in 1899, the new “Great Central” main line was built to very high standards, with easy gradients and generous clearances, providing a new, fast, direct route between the North of England, the Midlands and London. Had it not been closed by Dr Beeching in 1966 we might not be about to spend billions on building HS2 now!   

“So - what has all this got to do with Sudbury?” you may be asking. Though the new line via Aylesbury and Harrow-on-the-Hill was complete, all was not well.  Watkin had died in 1894 - the Great Central was not happy about the track-sharing arrangements with the Metropolitan, with whom it had a fractious relationship, so it decided to get round the problem – literally – by building its own separate “loop line” route from Grendon Underwood Junction – north of Quainton Road – through High Wycombe, Gerrards Cross and South Ruislip, to rejoin the Metropolitan route at Neasden Junction a few miles northwest of Marylebone. This included taking over and upgrading the existing Great Western line between High Wycombe and Princes Risborough. This new Great Central/Great Western main line opened in 1906 – ironically, by this time the disagreements with the Metropolitan had been resolved, so arguably the new line was not necessary at all. However, it did give Sudbury another pair of stations and another route into London (and of course out to the Chilterns and beyond). These new stations – Sudbury & Harrow Road and Sudbury Hill Harrow – were spacious and well laid out.  The platforms were on loop lines, enabling expresses and freight trains to speed through on the fast lines in the middle, the platforms had large canopies and buildings (largely wooden at Sudbury & Harrow Road, built as it was on an embankment), and both stations had goods depots.

However, the Great Central and its successors were never particularly interested in suburban traffic. The First World War and its aftermath killed off the Channel Tunnel idea for many years to come, and in 1923 the line came – rather bizarrely – under the wing of the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER). Nationalisation in 1948 placed it even more incongruously into the Eastern Region of British Railways, but it was transferred more logically to the London Midland Region in 1958. By now its freight traffic was in decline, it was seen as a duplicate of the Midland Main Line, its fast services declined or disappeared, and in 1966 the main trunk section north of Aylesbury was closed.  For the next few years, increasingly elderly diesel trains continued to chug along between Marylebone, Aylesbury and Banbury (surviving a hare-brained 80s scheme to close Marylebone and turn the line’s trackbed into a high-speed coach route), until BR modernised the route shortly before privatisation, giving the new Chiltern Railways company a head start in developing and upgrading services to what they are today.

Apart, of course, from the suburban service through Wembley Hill (as it then was), the Sudburys and Northolt Park. Never particularly frequent, by the early 60s this had dwindled to serving these stations in rush-hours only (but at least they still stopped in both directions), plus a handful of trains on Saturday mornings, and this remained the picture for many years (though the Saturday-morning services didn’t last too much longer).  The generous track layouts were simplified to save maintenance costs - the loop lines at the stations were pulled up (how everyone regrets that now!), their platform buildings were demolished and replaced with basic shelters, and Sudbury & Harrow Road in particular suffered appallingly from vandalism. Eventually, in 1985, the station was rebuilt with a central island platform on the site of the old fast lines, and the decaying wooden side platforms were demolished. The goods depots, of course, had long since closed and have been built on.

Slowly, however, some services did improve. Wembley Hill (subsequently renamed Wembley Complex, then Stadium) was the first to have its service upgraded to all-day, followed by Northolt Park. Concerted pressure from the London Transport Users Committee (now London TravelWatch), led in 2004 to Sudbury Hill Harrow having its Monday-Friday offpeak service restored for the first time for over 40 years, leaving Sudbury & Harrow Road as the last remaining “rush hours only” station on the route.

And that brings us up to the present day. In fact, while services at all other Chiltern line stations have improved over time, Sudbury & Harrow Road’s has actually got worse. Until 2004 it did at least have a couple of trains in the middle of the day, it was possible to travel out towards Gerrards Cross in the morning and back in the evening, and for a few years it had five trains from Marylebone in the evening whereas now it has only four.  The problem is twofold – Chiltern’s negative attitude to its suburban stations (in sharp contrast to its go-ahead “can-do” attitude elsewhere), and the Passenger Service Requirement (PSR), which sets the minimum service level that franchisees are obliged to provide. PSRs were devised when the railways were being privatised back in the mid-90s, and were typically slightly worse than the service level they had at that time. Thus, if a station’s last train was at 23 30, the PSR might say that the last train should run “no earlier than 23 10”. The idea was supposedly to give franchisees “flexibility” (hmmmm…..).  At that time, the Sudburys had had basically a rush-hours-only service since the early 60s (barring the odd train at other times), so their PSR was based on a service level that had been decided over 30 years previously. Moreover, in 2000 Chiltern were uniquely granted a 20 year franchise (most ran for only seven years). In other words, there is currently no obligation on Chiltern to improve a service level that was set 20 years ago and which was then based on the level which had been set 30 years before that!  This takes no account of the massive changes in people’s travel needs and requirements over a period of over 50 years – a ludicrous situation, but one which nobody has any obligation to change until the franchise comes up for renewal, and then only if the Dept for Transport are prepared to listen to the pleas of groups such as STRA. Another option would be for TfL to take over the Marylebone-West Ruislip local service, but it is inexplicably missing from the Mayor’s “wish-list” of routes that he wants to take over, despite being the worst service in his area. It is therefore vital to build a strong locally-based campaign, so that a strong, convincing and persuasive case for an improved service can be made – both at franchise-renewal time and in the run-up to it.

Sources –

London’s Local Railways – Alan A Jackson

Metro Memories – Dennis Edwards & Ron Pigram

And of course…..Wikipedia!