[1] At periods other than the Regatta, many of the line's users are commuters to London, and students attending the nearby Henley College.

All services are operated by Great Western Railway (GWR), using Class 165 and 166 Turbo diesel multiple units.

By the seventeenth century it was an established coaching stop, and it was only in the railway age that the dominance of the town was brought into question.

[7] The Great Western Railway opened its main line as far as a temporary wooden terminus at Twyford on 1 July 1839, extending to Reading on 30 March 1840.

[8] Twyford was the nearest station to Henley, but customary transport routes using the River Thames continued in use for the time being.

In 1852 the possibility of incursion by competing companies was again in evidence and the powers for construction were due to expire in 1854, so the GWR made application for an extension of time.

This risked delay while the line was resurveyed, and time was already tight to achieve deposition of a Bill in the 1853 session.

)[9] The Bill for time extension was presented to Parliament and it received the Royal Assent on 4 August 1853; it included powers to raise additional capital.

The condition of the line was good, except that the station buildings were incomplete and a turntable was still to be finished, and Yolland recommended that approval for opening be given, subject to the use of tank engines in the absence of the turntable, and the adoption of one engine in steam working, There was a separate bay platform for branch trains at Twyford, approached by a sharp curve; there was one intermediate station at Shiplake.

[9] There were three timber viaducts on the line: the most important was the Thames crossing between Wargrave and Shiplake; it was constructed of three main spans of 40 feet using A-frames by which the clearance beneath the truss is maximised.

[9][10][12] An engineer involved in the gauge conversion wrote about it: I found myself at nine o'clock one evening in the company of two permanent way inspectors in a packer's hut midway between Twyford and Henley.

The slopes of the railway were covered with men, but all one could hear was the distant sound of an engine shunting in Henley station yard.

At length there came a whistle and we could hear the approaching train, followed by a kind of roar which developed into, "Now, all together, over," with a grunt like a miner's, when he brings his sledge down on the drill.

But not so; one of the inspectors, being of the opinion that if we did not keep awake we should catch cold, threw a fog signal into the fire and we promptly moved out.

[14]In this period Henley was gaining increasing ascendancy as a favourite leisure resort, and also as a residential area.

[9][10][11] There had been some difficulties with the undulating gradient on the line as originally constructed, and in 1895 works were carried out between Twyford and Shiplake to improve matters.

In the same year further work was carried out at Henley-on-Thames providing further siding accommodation and extending the platforms, responding to the very considerable increase in patronage as Henley town developed as a Thames resort In July 1896 the decision was taken to double the line, at an estimated cost of £21,275; as part of the work Shiplake station was provided with an island platform.

The 8.50 a.m. up branch train from Henley, which meets a direct fast to Paddington at Twyford, also works through vehicles to London.

[11] The Great Western Railway developed a system referred to as Automatic train control (ATC).

In its developed form it gave drivers an audible and visual indication in the cab of the aspect of a distant signal as it was approached or passed.

The through trains to London were generally worked by main line tender engines, in later years of the Hall or Castle class.

[11] The boom in railway use at Henley declined after World War II, and the line was reduced to single track in two stages on 11 and 20 June 1961.

The line is continuously track circuited, and there are acceptance switches or levers at Twyford, Shiplake, and Henley.

This is done by means of computor [sic] techniques using arrangements of plug-in electronic "bogie" units, in which transistors and magnetic cores perform "logical" switching operations.