Great Western Railway becomes Open

The purpose of this listing is to show an historic Advertisement that was found using the online British Newspaper Archive. It comes from the Wiltshire Independent Newspaper dated 7th January, 1841. It states that the line running between London and Bristol is open and also that Shrivenham Station is open too. An historic beginning that continues to this day.

But in the previous summer the Greyhound Hotel Coach Office at Bath advertised the fact that the railway line had then reached the Leather Bottle (on the Faringdon to Wantage road), and the journey time using their horse-drawn coach from Bath to London was then only 8 hours.

It was an enterprising use of the old and the new - but the horse-drawn coaching business was coming to an end.

We have also included a map of the railway network as it was before the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.