Competition from road traffic starting in the early twentieth century put pressure on the railway, and it was later a victim of the Beeching cuts.

[1] Two earlier proposals had been made in 1845 and 1846 for a railway serving Newport Pagnell: both schemes failed to attract sufficient capital.

[1][6] In 1865, powers were granted to extend the line from Newport Pagnell to Olney and then on to meet the Northampton and Peterborough Railway at Wellingborough.

[9] In 1898, the first motor bus service in Buckinghamshire began running between Newport Pagnell and Olney,[1] followed by numerous other routes, which took traffic away from the railway line.

[6] The branch was included in the Beeching report of 1963 which concluded that, since 30% of the railway network carried less than 1% of the total passenger traffic, much of it should be closed.

[9] The mourning of the line was so great that a bucket of water was poured over a double dressed as Richard Beeching, the man commonly associated with the closure of over 4,000 miles of the British railway network.