Halts on the Metropolitan Railway

In the days before BR, "Halt" generally meant "unstaffed station" rather than "request stop".

Ahh yes, "Preston Road for Uxendon"

It served the Golf course and was constructed in Wood. It had a fascinating History. No trace of it now though I think.

Surely most Met stations were constructed in wood originally. When I first worked on the Underground Liverpool Street platforms were still constructed of wood with a layer or two of tarmac on the surface. It was one of several stations that I worked at with wooden platforms in the late 1970s. The platforms were rebuilt slowly over a long period of time during various projects.

Could you elaborate on this history if possible as im keen to know more about this station.

so when the line was expanded im guessing the two tracks that are now the fast service lines were added either side of the origianal tracks, as the BR line has always been where it is.

ok, I wasnt quite such because looking at a photo from the 1930s it shows both original platforms as they were (supposedly either side of todays northbound lines) yet if you look today there doesnt seem enough room between the fast LU line and the BR line to have ever sited a platform so im guessing these lines were re-aligned at some point closer to one another.

There seems to be a wonderful absence of fact in the most recent stages of this thread


In fact the line was electrified in 1904, being available to electric trains from late November. However Electric services were not introduced until Sunday 1st January 1905.
Re-siting of the station occurred in two stages. The southbound/up platform was replaced by the new station on 22 November 1931, but the northboud/down platform remained in use until 3rd January 1932.

The history and arrangement of the tracks at Preston Road is complicated, but here goes:

The first pair of tracks opened 2nd August 1880. Generally these are the current northbound Met tracks.
With the coming of the GCR Line into Marylebone. The Metropolitan provided an additional pair of tracks to the south of the original lines between Canfield Place and Harrow. These new tracks came into use in two stages; Canfield Place - Preston Road 9th March 1899 and Preston Road to Harrow 16th September 1900 and from 31st March 1901 the GCR (and its successors) had exclusive use of this new pair of tracks. Between 16/9/1900 & 31/3/1901 the Met had also used the new tracks between Preston Road and Harrow, while the original pair of tracks were closed to allow repairs to the bridge carrying them over the West Coast Main Line between Preston Road and Northwick Park.
As traffic increased the Met provided a further pair of tracks to the north of the existing tracks for its own use between Finchley Road and Harrow in stages; Fincley Road - Kilburn 30/11/1913,
Willesden Green - Neasden 5/1/1914, Wembley - Neasden 11/1/1914 (the new tracks on this section were actually between the old Met Tracks and the GCR tracks, presumably because of the presence of Neasden Depot; even to day there is still a sizable gap between the Met Tracks and the Chiltern tracks over this section.), Kilburn - Willesden Green 31/5/1915. The section from Wembley to Harrow was a much later project being completed 10th January 1932.
The arrangement of tracks needs some explaining; The Wembley to Finchley Road section was arranged with the local lines adjacent to the GCR tracks with the fast lines being the newer 1914/15 tracks. Between Wembley and Harrow the fast lines were adjacent to the GCR tracks, with the newer 1931/2 tracks being the local lines. The tracks crossed each other just to the north of Wembley Park Station. The probable reason that this swapping of position took place was to enable the local lines to have direct connection to the (new) Stanmore and Uxbridge branches and thus avoid trains to these branches having to cross the fast lines; a flyunder at Harrow for the Uxbridge branch had already been provided in order to avoid conflict with GCR trains.

In practice this arrangement left a lot to be desired and so things were re-arranged when the Bakerloo Line was extended from Baker Street to Finchley Road. Naturally it had to be done in stages, necessitating as it did complete re-signalling and substantial alterations to junctions. The southern end was dealt with first and by 1938 the tracks south of Preston Road had been re-arranged to the pattern we now recognise. Immediately north of Preston Road was a temporary junction where the southbound fast line crossed both local lines on the level. In the station area itself you can still see the gap between the two northbound tracks where the SB fast line used to run. The re-arrangement was finally completed in 1948 when the Harrow area was re-signalled, the work having been seriously delayed by the war. This created a similar gap between the northbound tracks at Northwick Park.
The final change, in 1954, was the provision of a further additional pair of tracks (making the formation eight tracks wide)between Wembley Park and a point south of Preston Road. This allowed the complete segregation of Met & Bakerloo lines, who until then had shared the local line between Wembley and the point where the Stanmore branch diverges.

I've now got a copy of Met. No 1 Working Timetable No 65, from 1st November 1906.

p5 of the book has an extract of the Uxbridge service, which has Rayners Lane Halt, Eastcote Halt, Ickenham Halt on the galley and a footnote underneath saying that ^{All trains will call at Rayner's Lane, Eastcote and Ickenham Halts} The morning weekday staff from Harrow has the † mark indicating that it would call at Eastcote for staff purposes.

The service was run by trains F31 and F33 (3-car electric) on weekdays, F16 (also 3-car electric) on Sundays.

It was complex wasn't it! The 1904 stock had BWE equipment, the 1905 had a mixture of BWE and BTH and the 1906 stock had BTH!

The titles of the three salient WTTs are:

Met No 1 Section WTT 65 1/11/1906; Baker Street, Marylebone, Willesden Green, Uxbridge, Chesham, Aylesbury, Brill, Verney Junction Etc Etc.

Met No 2 Section WTT 66 3/12/1906; Inner Circle, Hammersmith, Richmond and Kensington Lines, G.W. Main Line Passenger Trains to and from Aldgate, and GW goods trains to and from Smithfield.

Met No 4 Section WTT 188 12/06/1915 Widened Lines.

The No 2 Section has a subsection on the title page that says Met and GW Light Engines will continue to run as shown in Working Time Table (Section 3) for November 1905 as long as trains for which they run are worked by Steam Locomotives (so what's the No 3 section here?).

Furthermore, there is no stock make up in the No 2 section but there is a long list of codes that I'd just finished typing up when my inept fingers chose to delete the information, suffice to say it breaks down into Met/District Circle trains or Local circle trains (that don't do a rounder), steam or otherwise to Hammersmith, Addison Road and Richmond, again local is used for part-trip journeys, GW <spit> trains divide into Hammersmith, Richmond Main Line (and Main Line to Bishop's Road only), SE&CR trains New Cross (SEC) to Whitechapel ELL. This WTT has a reversed galley with stations across the top and each train occupies a new line - however the traditional breaks of South Ken and Aldgate are used for the circle; although SK - Edgware Road - Aldgate - SK is classed as 'up' and the other way is classed as 'down'. Nothing so esoteric or understandable as inner or outer rail here!

The No 1 section does have a stock breakdown (and I'm gonna tempt the deletionary muse by putting in the codes):

A 3 coach old stock
B 5 coach old stock
BB 6 coach old stock
C 5 coach bogie stock
D 6 coach bogie stock
E Electric Trains 6 coaches
F Electric Trains 3 coaches

there are then a lot of horsey, milk, Great Central and temporal/hebdomadal exclusion/inclusion codes.

The stock working shews 10 E trains on weekdays (E1 - E10) with a 'Motor 5 Coach' (wording as printed) and the two Uxbridge 3-coach trains F31, F33. Sundays have 6 E trains (E1 - 6) and one F - F16.

If anyone's interested I'll have a look at (well more like revisit) the stock workings and/or type in the codes, if I don't delete the sodding things again. I'm off to bed to read about Mayflower and Galatea and uncoupling in the winter of '38. ;D

Not sure, saloon stock was susposed to be run as 7 cars, but ran as 6 (3 when the driving trailers were created). The bogie stock was built to 6/7 cars and ran electrically as 7 cars. I believe the bogie stock was made into 8 cars in 1925.

Dreadnoughts ran as 5 cars till 1920, so bar the jubilee 9 car rigid wheel trains, I think the first met train to run as 8 cars would have been the bogie stock in 1925. 6MW motors 2(7)00-2(7)05 ran as 8 cars with 2 motors sandwiching 6 bogie stock trailers (called W stock).

The first proper 8 car trains were the MW stock of 1932.

Thank you mrfs42. This train formation and code information is very interesting stuff. Any more you happen to find (or retype or scan if you prefer) would be gratefully received.

I assume these codes are the ones which developed into the M, N, V, VT etc codes (see old thread - Colin?)

BW, BTH
There were also two types of motor, 150 and 200 hp. Trains had to have the same type of motor cars to work properly. Many trailers had both BTH and BW jumpers and some even duplicated on both sides. There was also a special jumper to allow a "foreign" trailer to be used in a train.

I have read somewhere that there was a series of marks painted on rolling stock ends to distinguish the types of equipment. The only one I am positive about is that for the Circle Stock which was a dot with a circle round it. If a list of the others turns up in anybody's library I would be most grateful for a copy.

"Motor 5 Coach"
This was most likely one of the two 4-coach sets of Ashbury coaches which was coupled to a 200hp motor car to form a 5-car train. They were later modified to form part of 7-car all-Ashbury converted sets which were later increased to 8-car sets.

Train Length
Train length was no indicator of platform length since coaches varied in length. Purpose built electric vehicles were 51-52ft long whereas older steam stock was shorter. Ashbury vehicles were 39ft 6ins long.

Platform Lengthening
The 1921 rolling stock orders were in part due to platforms being lengthened to take 7-car trains and the later orders for the Vickers were part of the programmed extensions of platforms to take 8-car trains.

What was train 44? Train 45 was car 2769 with a saloon stock driving trailer coupled. The other compartment (ex saloon stock) motor 2768 was scrapped in Feb 1938

Yes it was. It had 6 compartments, the middle two being 1st class. The control trailers were all composite too.