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Wellingborough railway station

1857 establishments in EnglandCharles Henry Driver railway stationsDfT Category C2 stationsFormer Midland Railway stationsGrade II listed buildings in Northamptonshire
Incomplete lists from September 2017Pages with no open date in Infobox stationRailway stations in Great Britain opened in 1857Railway stations in NorthamptonshireRailway stations served by East Midlands RailwayUse British English from January 2014Wellingborough
Wellingboroughstationbuilding
Wellingboroughstationbuilding

Wellingborough railway station (formerly Wellingborough Midland Road) is a Grade II listed station located in the market town of Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, England. It lies on the Midland Main Line and is 65 miles (104 km) from London St. Pancras. The station is operated by East Midlands Railway, which is also the primary operator serving the station with passenger services under the Luton Airport Express brand. As well as Wellingborough itself, the station is also the closest to the towns of Higham Ferrers, Raunds, Irthlingborough and Rushden, although there is no direct public transport link from the station itself to any of these towns apart from Irthlingborough. It is also the nearest station to Rushden Lakes shopping centre. Wellingborough station was used as a filming location for the film Kinky Boots, standing in for Northampton station. In late 2009, Wellingborough was made a Penalty fare station by East Midlands Trains, which means a valid ticket or permit to travel must be shown when requested.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Wellingborough railway station (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Wellingborough railway station
Midland Road,

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 52.304 ° E -0.6764 °
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Wellingborough

Midland Road
NN8 1NQ , Burrow's Bush
England, United Kingdom
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Wellingboroughstationbuilding
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Wellingborough rail accident
Wellingborough rail accident

On 2 September 1898 at Wellingborough railway station a postman brought a mailcart to the station with mail which he was to see onto a train due at 20:22. The mail should then have been brought to the down platform through a passageway (normally closed by a gate kept locked from the inside) between the station yard and the platform. The postman went into the station, collected a luggage trolley, and took it along the platform to the platform side of the gate. Whilst the platform itself sloped towards the railway tracks quite noticeably, the passageway did not. The postman put down the handle by which he was drawing the trolley and unlocked the gate. He then reached round for the trolley handle only to see the trolley running off the edge of the platform and onto the down main line. He and the station foreman tried frantically to clear the trolley off the line as the signals were already set for the 19:15 London St Pancras to Manchester express to pass through the station non-stop. A train at the up platform prevented them simply moving the trolley onto the up-line, and it was not possible to lift the c 4+1⁄2 hundredweight (230kg) trolley 2 ft to get it back onto the platform. They attempted to get the trolley on its side in the "six-foot" between the two lines, but did not succeed and had to jump for their lives as the express neared. The leading bogie of the locomotive derailed on hitting the trolley, but the driving wheels did not; the engine continued onwards until it hit a diamond crossover at the north end of the station when it became completely derailed, detached from its tender and ended up facing backwards. The second passenger coach was completely wrecked. Both enginemen and five passengers were killed. The subsequent Board of Trade accident investigation showed that the down platform sloped unnecessarily steeply (1 in 24) towards the track, and that whilst the passageway was not so fiercely graded it still sloped at about 1 in 80 to the track. Practical experiment showed that this was quite sufficient to allow a luggage trolley to roll away unless the greatest care was taken. The Board of Trade Inspector recommended That station platforms should either be level or slope away from the railway lines That 3-wheeled and 4-wheeled trolleys used on railway station platforms (especially those sloping towards the railway) should have brakes which were normally applied, but which would be released by pushing or pulling the trolley