Site of the 1914 golfers' halt
Drag the round handle to slide between the old map (left) and today (right). On a phone, tap the map once to move it.
Then
The first Carpenders Park station opened on 1 April 1914 to serve the golf course, a wooden halt with two platforms and a footbridge. Its oil lamps earned it the local nickname Paraffin Junction. Each platform was 350 feet long, 9 feet wide and 2 feet 9 inches above rail level, with a booking office and waiting room on the down platform, a small waiting room on the up platform and a signal cabin with six working levers. Golfers reached the down platform by steps and a path from the course, through a kissing gate. The waiting room had fixed wooden seats, walls covered in railway posters and a coal fire kept going with coal the porter gathered off the track. By 1937, as the St Meryl estate grew, the halt was handling some 200,000 passengers a year.74,89,90,397,461,615,618,619
Now
By 1951 it was still two railway sleeper platforms with a small gas-lit wooden booking office and waiting room, and it could not be widened because the steam main lines ran so close, so only a new station would do. It closed in November 1952 when the present station opened, and Our Oxhey says the wooden platforms were taken away and re-used at Shefford in Bedfordshire. Trains now run past the spot.
Mentioned in
- The 1943 Housing Order: The 1946 plan Before the Estate
- Churches: St Alphege's, Carpenders Park Life on the Estate
Position from old Ordnance Survey maps and OpenStreetMap. See Sources and method.