In 1882 the entrepreneur and hotelier Frederick Gordon purchased Bentley Priory, a large country house near the rural village of Stanmore.
Known as "The Napoleon of the Hotel World", Gordon was a successful international businessman, and had earned his millions through companies such as Ashanti Goldfields, Apollinaris and Johannis, Pears soap and Bovril.
The location of Bentley Priory suffered from a lack of transport connections, and Gordon was not content to ferry his paying guests by horse-drawn stagecoach from London.
In order to make his resort more appealing to affluent clientele, he proposed the construction of a short railway line from nearby Harrow.
He successfully negotiated a contract with the LNWR, the railway company that owned the mainline at Harrow, to operate the Stanmore line on his behalf.
[1] Gordon's scheme met with some local opposition and he was forced to re-route the railway line further east to mitigate objections.
To allay the concerns of the local inhabitants — and to appeal to his well-heeled customers — Gordon commissioned an architect to design an elegant station building that resembled a Gothic-style English country church.
In an attempt to attract more passengers, the company opened a new intermediate station at Belmont in September 1932, and it also introduced diesel railcars onto the route and began to run Sunday services.
Despite still attracting substantial passenger numbers on rush hour services, the Stanmore branch line was closed as part of the Beeching cuts; the goods line from Belmont to Stanmore was shut on 6 July 1964, and the last passenger train ran from Belmont to Harrow on 5 October 1964.
A small paved path has been created to allow passengers to cross from platform 6 to the ticket hall without having to mount the footbridge.