Ashendon Junction in Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....

, England, was a major mainline railway junction

Junction (rail)

A junction, in the context of rail transport, is a place at which two or more rail routes converge or diverge.This implies a physical connection between the tracks of the two routes , 'points' and signalling.one or two tracks each meet at a junction, a fairly simple layout of tracks suffices to...

 where, from July 1910, the Great Western Railway

Great Western Railway

The Great Western Railway was a British railway company that linked London with the south-west and west of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament in 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838...

's (GWR) London-Birmingham direct route diverged from the Great Central Railway

Great Central Railway

The Great Central Railway was a railway company in England which came into being when the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway changed its name in 1897 in anticipation of the opening in 1899 of its London Extension . On 1 January 1923, it was grouped into the London and North Eastern...

's (GCR) main London-Sheffield route.

The junction was where what is now the Chiltern Main Line

Chiltern Main Line

The Chiltern Main Line is an inter-urban, regional and commuter railway, part of the British railway system. It links London and Birmingham on a 112-mile route via the towns of High Wycombe, Banbury, and Leamington Spa...

 (formerly the "Birmingham Direct Line" aka "Bicester cut-off" of the GWR), inaugurated in 1910, joined the post-1906 "Alternative Route"

Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway

The Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway was a joint venture supported by the Great Western Railway and Great Central Railway and run by the Great Western and Great Central Joint Committee. The original arrangement was agreed between the two companies in September 1898...

 alignment of the GCR. It stood 4 miles (6.4 km) north-east of today's . It was a high-speed flying junction

Flying junction

A flying junction or flyover is a railway junction at which one or more diverging or converging tracks in a multiple-track route cross other tracks on the route by bridge to avoid conflict with other train movements. A more technical term is "grade-separated junction"...

 carrying southbound GWR trains from Birmingham on an embankment with a girder bridge over the top of northbound Great Central trains travelling from London Marylebone on to the 90 mph five-mile link to Grendon Underwood Junction, where they rejoined the original Great Central Main Line

Great Central Main Line

The Great Central Main Line , also known as the London Extension of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway , is a former railway line which opened in 1899 linking Sheffield with Marylebone Station in London via Nottingham and Leicester.The GCML was the last main line railway built in...

 towards Brackley

Brackley

Brackley is a town in south Northamptonshire, England. It is about from Oxford and miles form Northampton. Historically a market town based on the wool and lace trade, it was built on the intersecting trade routes between London, Birmingham and the English Midlands and between Cambridge and Oxford...

 and beyond to the East Midlands and North.

Closure

When the Great Central was closed south of Rugby in September 1966, the junction became redundant and the trackwork was later dismantled. The link to Grendon Underwood was already relatively little used by then, at least as far as passenger trains were concerned, most services from Marylebone towards Brackley and beyond using the original GC route through Aylesbury after long-distance expresses were ended in 1960.

Few signs of the old Great Central lines can now be seen from ground level on the site of the junction itself, but the trackbed is clearly visible from the air. Immediately north of the site, the Great Central trackbed towards Grendon Underwood is still intact. Little other evidence remains, except that over the best part of a mile the twin tracks of the Chiltern route still diverge at this point, a relic of the old layout preserved when Chiltern Railways

Chiltern Railways

Chiltern Railways is a British train operating company. It was set up at the privatisation of British Rail in 1996, and operates local passenger trains from Marylebone station in London to Aylesbury and main-line trains on the Chiltern Main Line to Birmingham Snow Hill with its associated branches...

 redoubled the line between and Aynho Junction in 1998, it having been singled in the late 1960s.

Future

Among various proposals for reopening parts of the GCML, one which would explicitly involve rebuilding Ashendon Junction is the scheme of Central Railway (UK)

Central Railway (UK)

Central Railway is a British company which proposes to build a new intermodal freight railway line, with a generous loading gauge, connecting the Channel Tunnel with the north of England, using much of the trackbed of the former Great Central Railway....

for a new intermodal freight line between the north of England and the Channel Tunnel.