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Leamington Spa railway station is situated towards the southern edge of the centre of Leamington. It was first opened in the 1840s when the Great Western Railway built a line running from Birmingham to London through the town. Later building by the London and North-Western Railway added two further stations, Leamington Avenue, just north of the present station and Leamington Milverton a mile north-north-east from the current station. The trains running from those stations were local services to Rugby, Coventry and Weedon via Daventry.
Current Station
The current station has four platforms, with tracks to allow goods trains to pass through the station when passenger services are halted there at the main platforms. Platforms 1 and 4 are bay platforms serving commuter services to Birmingham, and platforms 2 and 3 service main line trains to various destinations in the United Kingdom. Up until early 2004 four train operators served Leamington station: Thames Trains, Central Trains, Chiltern Railways and Virgin Cross-Country. Currently only three operate services from Leamington, Chiltern having taken over responsibility for those services formerly run by Thames Trains. Chiltern is also scheduled to take over responsibility for services run by Central Train in 2006 when that franchise comes to an end.
Chiltern Trains services run mainly to Birmingham and London, terminating in Marylebone station in the north west part of central London and Snow Hill station in Birmingham. However, some Chiltern services do run beyond Birmingham. Virgin CrossCountry covers much of the rest of the country from Leamington. Its main services run to Poole in Dorset and up to Glasgow. They also take in intermediate destinations like Oxford, Reading, Southampton, Birmingham, Stafford, Manchester, Preston and Carlisle.
Three lines radiate out from Leamington, one heading south towards London and southern England, one going north to Coventry, and the other north west to Birmingham.
Leamington Avenue and Leamington Milverton Stations
Leamington Avenue and Milverton stations were built somewhat later in the 19th century than the current station. They also suffered closure under the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. The LNWR that built the line was subsumed into the London Midland and Scottish Railway in the 1923 grouping, and then into the Midland region of British Rail in 1948. The Beeching cuts also affected the line to Rugby, with most of its trackbed still being extant, but a substantial gap in south-eastern Leamington where the new housing estate of Sydenham has been built over the line of the former railway.
External links
- Leamington Spa station timetable (http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ldb/summary.aspx?T=LMS) from National Rail's Live Departure Boards
- Street map (http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?client=public&db=pc&addr1=&client=public&addr2=&advanced=&addr3=&pc=CV313NS&cidr_client=none) of Leamington Spa station, from multimap.com
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