Salisbury and Dorset Junction Railway
[2] Salisbury too was a desirable objective for the LSWR, which reached the city by a branch from Bishopstoke, by a line that opened in 1847.
[2] The area between Salisbury and the coast was generally agricultural, although there was some industry in Fordingbridge; the harbour at Poole was an attractive destination for a new railway, with its opportunities for maritime trade.
The Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway (WS&WR) planned a line from a junction near Chippenham to Salisbury.
Part of this was opened in 1847 but the company experienced difficulty in generating investment and progress towards completion was slow.
[2] As the railway network was taking shape, thoughts turned to interconnections that main lines did not provide, and a meeting in Salisbury on 20 October 1860 discussed just such a scheme.
There was to be a Poole branch, serving the harbour there, and a spur at Ringwood enabling direct running from West Moors to Christchurch and Bournemouth.
[3] Bournemouth was insignificant and had been ignored at the time of the promotion of the Southampton and Dorchester Railway, but had been growing and was now important enough to warrant this connection.
[4] An engineer named Hamilton Henry Fulton had surveyed the line and estimated that £180,000 was required to build it.
[5][6][7] There was disappointing interest from potential investors, and early shareholders' general meetings failed to achieve a quorum, which was an alarmingly bad sign for commitment to the construction.
The larger company agreed to finish the work with Salisbury & Dorset money, and do the first year's maintenance, for £1,500.
Once again the Directors blamed external factors, in this case the lack of a junction station at West Moors, and what they described as "the difficulty and delays which always arise in diverting from its old channels the long established traffic".
[7] At the Shareholders' General Meeting on 28 February 1867, the Chairman complained about the low level of local subscriptions.
[7] When the line was planned, Bournemouth was considered an insignificant small settlement; between 1836 and 1862 it had "grown into existence",[10] with a population of 691.
[11] Accordingly the southern end of the line was aligned towards Poole, for the harbour there, and the route therefore failed to adopt an easy course down the valley of the River Avon to Ringwood, an important town with a population of 2,075 in 1862.
On 1 January 1876 Alderholt station was opened; its name was changed to Daggons Road from 1 May 1876 to avoid confusion with Aldershot.
The inspecting officer for the Board of Trade Colonel J H Rich, asserted that the cause was inferior passenger rolling stock travelling too fast over a track not designed for that speed.
[15] A practical consequence was that a 25 mph speed restriction was imposed over the line, adding considerably to journey times, and resulting in some connections being broken.
Since the 1930s the business on the line had been dwindling, due to increasingly efficient competition from road transport in a predominantly rural area.
[17] White, writing in 1961 said "Local passenger traffic has always been exiguous and services infrequent by the standards of Southern England.
The Times newspaper's special correspondent was not impressed by the turnout of objectors; 120 people had lodged objections, but in the hall there were only 60 persons, which included a fifteen-man committee, British Railways representatives, newspapermen and a strong team from Dorset County Council.
