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Dorset’s Smallest Station

Chetnole Halt, 20 miles north of Weymouth on the Heart of Wessex Line, is Dorset’s smallest station - around 1,000 passengers use it annually. It’s also a train request halt so passengers on the station platform have to signal to the driver to stop. Opened in September 1933, it was originally constructed of wood as in the above photograph.
In the early 1960s, the Government tasked Dr Richard Beeching with reducing the cost of running the country’s railways. Dorset stations such as Wimborne, Lyme Regis and Blandford closed. How did Chetnole, a village with a population of just over 300 people, keep its station? Maybe it was an administrative oversight by the British Railways Board bureaucrats at 222 Marylebone Road in London?



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  1. Anonymous7 August 2024 at 10:37

    Now concrete and has been for 50 years!!

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