Category: Takeley

Located near to Stane Street Halt, this is the former Takeley railway station. The railway station first opened its doors on 22 February 1869, part of the Bishop’s Stortford, Dunmow and Braintree Railway.

The railway station welcomed royalty going to Easton Hall, including when the Prince of Wales visited in 1889. They would have likely been greeted by Henry Farnham, the station master, who had been at the station since the mid 1870s. Farnham died in 1893 at the age of just 43, leaving a wife, Mary Jane, and five children. There’s an image of Mary Jane’s grave at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/178342244/mary-jane-farnham.

As I mentioned on my Stane Street Halt post, this line never really had enough passengers and so it closed to passenger traffic in the early 1950s. It’s evident from this map from the 1890s that there simply weren’t really enough residents in the local area to support this.

Takeley now has the advantage of having Stansted Airport within its boundaries and so this railway station would have likely been quite useful had it stayed in operation. The station buildings are now used for residential purposes after many decades of being left empty.

There’s more information about the station, with some older photos, at http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/t/takeley/index.shtml.

One of the interesting parts of the Stansted Stagger challenge walk (a separate post is coming on that) was this former railway line from Braintree to Bishop’s Stortford. It always struggled and was closed in 1952 as the area around it was too rural to justify a service. Now, there’s a slight irony that around 500 metres to the right of this photo is Stansted Airport and this railway line would have been potentially enormously useful for that.

This is the site of Stane Street Halt railway station, which was added to the line in December 1922 in an attempt to boost passengers numbers. A full station couldn’t be justified here as the population was too small, but they hoped to encourage some of the Takeley residents to use it. The station was named after the nearby Stane Street Roman Road which went from Ermine Street in Hertfordshire to Colchester in Essex.

The introduction of these halts, which were by request only, meant that they had to change the rolling stock to allow passengers to disembark without a platform to disembark onto. Although all rather positive in terms of trying to increase usage, the line was closed to passengers in March 1952. It continued to be used by freight services until 1972 and then it was all ripped up and all evident of the halt removed.

There were services to Northumberland Park, where Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane football stadium was located, directly from the halt which showed some initiative in getting people straight into London. The Westminster Gazette made reference to it in 1926 noting:

“It is not more than 30 miles from London, and it has a railway station – if such a name can be applied to Stane Street Halt, whose only evidence of being a station is a little platform barely ten years long.”

The Friends of the Flitch Way helped to restore the station halt back in 2011. They also added a useful information board which gives some more details about the history of the halt, which is a really helpful thing to add.