Bristol Temple Meads Railway Station
Bristol Temple Meads is the main and largest railway station in the British city of Bristol in south-west England , in front of Bristol Parkway . It was used by over 5.6 million passengers in the 2004/2005 operating year.
Railway companies and destinations
Bristol Temple Meads is currently served by the three railroad companies First Great Western , CrossCountry and South West Trains , which connect it to numerous regional and national destinations. CrossCountry operates on the routes from Edinburgh via Bristol to Plymouth and from Manchester via Bristol to Cardiff . While South West Trains connects Bristol with Waterloo station in London , First Great Western offers numerous regional connections.
Due to the location of the access routes, trains to Wales , the Midlands , North England, London and the South Coast all leave the station for the east. Only trains to Cornwall leave the station on the west side.
history
The name of the area in which the train station is located is derived from the neighboring Temple Church, which was built by the Knights Templar in the 12th century and was destroyed by aerial bombs during World War II . The site was located on an inland port and the municipal cattle market was built on a neighboring property in 1830.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the original terminus for the Great Western Railway (GWR) . The station concourse had a 22 meter wide wooden roof. The facility also included a storage hall and a Tudor-style office building . Bristol Temple Meads is the oldest surviving main train station in the world and is considered one of the most outstanding examples of Victorian train station architecture. Operations in the direction of Bath began on August 31, 1840, and from 1841 the trains ran on the completed Great Western Main Line to London Paddington .
The neighboring through station was built between 1871 and 1878 under the direction of Brunel's former partner Matthew Digby Wyatt . The curved concourse is 500 feet (152 m) long and has a wrought iron roof. This station replaced the 1844 terminus of the Bristol and Exeter Railway , which was at right angles to the GWR station. The Bristol and Exeter Railway office building still stands on the access road to the station. At that time, Brunel's station building was also expanded and connected to the new building. In the 1930s, the through station was expanded to include two more platforms.
The GWR freight yard was built on the northwest side, between the passenger station and the inland port. In 1872 the Bristol Harbor Railway opened. It began between the passenger station and the freight yard, crossed the neighboring road on a bridge, then crossed in a tunnel under the cemetery of the parish church of St Mary Redcliffe and ended in the shipyard further downstream. The port railway was in operation until 1964.
The GWR tracks were laid with a gauge of 2140 mm. From 1844 the trains of the Bristol and Gloucester Railway (B&G) also operated on this broad gauge . In 1846, the B&G was taken over by the Midland Railway , which converted the line to the standard gauge of 1435 mm in 1853 . Three- rail tracks were laid on the access route to Temple Meads station. In 1892 the last broad gauge section was changed. The station remained jointly owned by GWR and Midland Railway (since 1923 London, Midland and Scottish Railway ) until nationalization in 1948 .
The old part of the station was closed in 1965 and was left to decay for more than twenty years before it was renovated. From 1989 to 1999 the building housed the interactive science museum The Explanatory . It has housed the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum since 2002 . Both the Brunel building and the extension are now a listed building . The connecting wing between the two parts of the station, which was also built in the 1870s, has served as a car park since 1965 .
literature
- John Binding: Brunel's Bristol Temple Meads. OPC Railprint, 2001. ISBN 0-86093-563-9
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 26 ′ 56 " N , 2 ° 34 ′ 48" W.