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Post by Geoffram on Jul 8, 2012 18:26:35 GMT
I'd be interested to know if any of the Forum's members could shed light on this. Back in 1906, the executive committee of the Franco-British Exhibition joined forces with the then very new British Olympic Committee to hold a combined exhibition/Olympic Games on the site in Shepherds Bush that eventually became the BBC Television Centre. They had two entrances to the site: one on Wood Lane itself, and the other on Uxbridge Road, which survived - albeit in a reduced form - into this century, until the Westfield development swallowed it up. The Uxbridge Road entrance led to long exhibition halls which were built on stilts over the tracks of the Central London depot in Wood Lane, and then carried on round the perimeter of the depot to form the roof of the station that was built (in an extraordinary short amount of time) to bring people right up to the gates of the exhibition, the Central London's Wood Lane. It seems that the construction of this walkway took place without closing any of the tracks below. I've tried to research as to how this extraordinary feat of engineering came about, but can find no record of it in the Central London archives. Just wondered whether the learned members of the forum had come across any information about this construction, in particular what the Central London gained through having the walkways constructed above it.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 8, 2012 22:57:33 GMT
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Post by tubeprune on Jul 12, 2012 14:48:55 GMT
The huge traffic to and from the exhibition and the games, plus years of exhibitions and sporting events in the following years was what the Central London got out of it. They installed the station and the loop without too much trouble as most of the erection work consisted of mounting steel columns around the outside of the depot. It was still in place when I worked there in the late 1970s. If you look at this photo: www.flickr.com/photos/25347284@N04/2392420872/in/set-72157625036026052you can see, in the foreground, the sheds built in 1947 for the relaid depot, the original loco shed in brick behind them and then the remains of the exhibition halls behind that. I went all over that site when I worked at the RTC. You can see more about it here: www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/Woodlane%20whitecity.htm
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