The Oxford train from Marylebone

The Oxford Train from Marylebone

Marylebone station is a London terminus. It is a terminus for a few mainline destinations – Birmingham, and now Oxford; otherwise for commuter communities and various towns in the West Midlands (including, indirectly Stratford-on-Avon). But it is distinctly off-line in many respects.

It stands on no major thoroughfare or prominent traffic intersection. It is served by one minor tube line. One could pass many years in London without having occasion to use the station (all its inter-city destinations are served as well by trains from bigger, and better known, London stations. Many people (I among them until fairly recently) don’t even know where it is (somewhere near the northern end of Baker Street, above the Marylebone Road).

When you do get there, you find what is, by terminus standards, an extremely petite affair. Marylebone was something of an afterthought to the C19 railways boom, being built right at the end of the century. It had to fight for room with the vast expansion of North London terraced housing, and came into operational being with a mere 3 or 4 platforms and a small but agreeable concourse building in decorative red brick.

That is pretty much how things stand today – a small concourse; 3 platforms under train shed roof, and 3 more, mostly recently-added, tacked onto the side outside the roof.

The core raison d’etre of Marylebone is to provide commuter services to prosperous towns and villages to the West and North West of London. That, rather than the supplementary services to the Midlands, is the reason that it has survived threatened closure. And, since 2015, it also hosts a service to Oxford with, as we shall see, a crucial commuter-friendly component. This new service has been enabled by some extensive upgrade work to what used to be a local branch line in the Oxford area.

What an attractive journey it is (in most respects). Anyone familiar with the Paddington – Oxford journey along the Thames Valley will not attest to its beauty - Slough, Reading Didcot en route, and, glimpses of the Thames apart, largely featureless countryside.  Take the train from Marylebone, and you get continual vistas of lovely Chiltern Hills and valleys, undulating and teeming with sheep, crops or woods. True, the countryside is punctuated by small stations with big, ugly multi-storey car parks – but that’s the economy of the line.

There is a strange element to the journey. On the way to Oxford the train stops at the inaptly named “Bicester Village”. This bucolic title doesn’t indicate any modern Adlestrop (the wayside halt, silent in deep summer apart from birdsong, where a train pauses for a signal, as celebrated by the poet Edward Thomas in 1914, before his death in WW1). It is the stop for a big cluster of discount designer clothing outlets. I’ve read that Bicester Village is the second most popular destination in the UK for Chinese tourists. Certainly, when I took the train there many middle and far Eastern families on board; and, at Bicester Village, they all “alighted”. There are even station and train announcements in Mandarin and Arabic, guiding tourists safely onto, and off, the Bicester Village train.

I “alighted” at the newly built (for the convenience of Oxfordshire London commuters) Oxford Parkway, to the North of the City. The station lives up to its name. It boasts a huge car park adjoining a huge park-and-ride car park.

From here there is a merciful and frequent bus to Oxford’s centre.

September 2017