In southwest London, there is an adventure to be had at Chessington. It’s not the theme park of the same name. This adventure does not require you to step off the quaint South station. All you need to do is wait and, if the time is right, a train will call at the never used ghost platform at Chessington South. A freight train.
This, however, is no apparition. Behind a ghostly white light, and in spotless blue livery, creeping eerily slowly from under the darkness of the bridge, rolls a train from DCRail, whose services come from a line never built, and call at a platform never used, eerily on their way to places you never knew. This is the other-worldly tale of Chessington South.
The passengers who never arrived
Now, you may know the DCRail operation as part of the Cappagh Group of companies. Their business is all about moving bulk loads over long distances. They bring aggregates to the places that need building materials in bulk. They do reliable. They don’t do dramatic. Until now.
This uncharacteristic apparent apparition is worthy of a Dickensian ghost story. David Fletcher, the Cappagh Group director of rail, does not usually begin his public presentations in the melodramatic manner of a nineteenth-century novelist. This, however, is the exception. “After the passengers departed…”, he says, in sombre tones “…or in this case, never arrived!”
What lies beyond the last stop
So begins the still-born tale of the platform that never was, and the trains that never called upon it. Chessington, an affluent outer suburb in the very south of London, is well served by two stations – North and South. Hardly a kilometre apart, they seem remarkably close together for the last two stops on a branch line, currently served by South Western Railway. However, South was never intended to be the last stop.
The up platform (towards London) at Chessington South was built in the late 1930s for planned extension of the line through to Leatherhead, less than five miles (8km) further south. This would have provided Chessington, and other affluent suburbs, with a loop line and a through service to the south coast of England. Traffic was anticipated to access the resort towns and the ports for the Continental ferries and the Atlantic steamers (a source of well-heeled passenger traffic at the time). Had the intended additional stations been built, the communities of Malden Rushett and Pachesham Park would potentially have turned into much larger commuter-belt townships than the villages they are today.
Aggregates traffic breathes life into the “up” apparition
The line was under construction at the beginning of World War Two. Some preparatory civil engineering was carried out, with the possible intention of military use. However, tracks were never laid further than the goods yard just beyond Chessington South station. The entire scheme was abandoned and never revived after the war. The outcome ever since has been that the single “down” platform has been comfortably able to cope with traffic, and the never-used “up” has steadily succumbed to nature.
The goods yard did see use periodically. It was mainly employed as a coal depot, until domestic demand dwindled below viability. “Until the opening of our new aggregates depot, the tracks hadn’t seen regular use since the 1980s”, explained David Fletcher. “Now they play a key role in the supply of construction materials. I very much suspect it is still the original track laid in the 1930s.”
Ghosting out after the passenger train departs
From under the road bridge, just south of the station, a modern goods train appears. No ghostly clouds of steam billow around these possibly pre-war tracks. This apparition is a very corporeal Class 60. The bridge that echoes to the diesel engine was built with the anticipation of through traffic, where a level crossing was deemed too disruptive to suburban life at the time. This legacy is a useful outcome for DCRail, whose present-day operations would be hampered by such an “at-grade” arrangement.
Now, after four decades of disuse, when it slumbered under a growing veil of greenery, the bright blue of DCRail has brought the ghost platform to life. “The platform isn’t needed for passenger operations”, says David. “Even the peak fifteen-minute service is able to use the single down platform. It is handy for us so we can depart earlier behind the passenger trains, on a route that has limited signalling capacity.”
It’s quite a startling sight, in the quiet setting of a very leafy suburb. While it might give a surprise to the unsuspecting commuters, there’s certainly nothing ghostly about a laden aggregates train, pulling away from Chessington South. However, as scholars of Victorian drama will readily point out, the most famous of all Dickensian ghost stories could easily have been set in a place like this. It is of course: The Signalman.