A north–south railway, later to be part of a long-distance trunk route, opened from Swindon to its own station at Marlborough in 1881, extending south to Andover in 1881.

[2][3] Although Marlborough was an important market town, the new B&HER main line passed some distance to the south, near the village of Burbage.

Local businessmen promoted an independent branch line, the Marlborough Railway, to connect their town to the Savernake station of the B&HER, north of Burbage.

[4] The GWR station in Marlborough was to the south-east of the town centre, on the west side of Salisbury Road; it had a substantial L-shaped red brick building with waiting rooms for both first-class and ordinary passengers.

[5] There was also a separate goods yard to the south of the station and an engine shed to the north-east near the buffer stops.

[6] Having built its lines from the north and the south, the financially strapped SM&AR then found that it could not join them, being unable to afford to persuade landowners to sell their property to build the missing link.

From February 1883, SM&AR through trains used the GWR Marlborough branch and a short section of the B&HER main line, including Savernake station.

The company negotiated successfully with the Marquess of Ailesbury to run a new line from the M&SWJR station in Marlborough, through a 640-yard tunnel and across Savernake Forest.

It opened for through traffic on 26 June 1898, at which point the link just outside Marlborough station to the GWR branch line was closed.

The April 1910 timetable, for example, shows each line offering about eight services a day, though the GWR did not run trains on Sundays.

For a few years, the GWR did nothing to rationalise the anomaly of having two parallel lines running into the town, but it did rename the stations.

Marlborough, about midway between London and Bath/Bristol, had become a focus for long-distance east–west bus services and the railway found it difficult to compete.