Salisbury’s future… and a mysterious past

Plans to transform Salisbury station are being developed. Meanwhile, a lost tunnel has been rediscovered beneath the buildings. But where did it go and what was it for? Paul Clifton dons his hard hat and goes underground.

In this article:

• Salisbury station is set for major changes, including a potential new northern entrance and reopening of Platform 1.
• The decision on replacing ageing diesel trains will shape future infrastructure, with battery-electric options likely.
• A mysterious underground tunnel has been uncovered, sparking intrigue about its possible destination.

It’s all change at Salisbury station. Passengers only notice a part-built station forecourt, where construction work gets in their way.

But that’s just the start for this heartbeat of the West of England Line, where South Western Railway’s longest route is crossed by services from the South Coast to Bristol and Cardiff.

Everything hinges on a critical decision about how to replace the ageing Class 158 and ‘159’ diesel trains that are maintained in the 1990s depot behind the station.

“We really need that decision within the next year or two,” explains SWR Regional Development Manager Andrew Ardley.

“Because the trains won’t last beyond the early 2030s. And if we go down the battery-electric route, which seems likely, we will need some changes to infrastructure ready for those trains. That does not give us very long. At the same time, big changes to signalling are due from 2029.

“A huge amount of new housing is appearing all along the West of England route, so we need to plan for growth in passenger numbers.

“And that presents an opportunity to make very substantial improvements to Salisbury station - we will need them if we are to handle more traffic.”

Top of the agenda is to rediscover Platform 1.

On the northern side of the station, it has been out of passenger use for many decades. Used only for depot movements, it is an extraordinary treasure trove of railway history. Behind the platforms are rooms that have been lost to public memory, with exquisite tiling and even posters from the 1950s, masked with generations of dust.

Ardley hopes this will be the moment to create the railway’s long-held ambition for a new northern entrance to the station. But to understand that, you need to grasp a little of the railway’s history.

Brunel’s Great Western reached Salisbury from Warminster. It was some years later that the rival London & South Western Railway built the larger station we know today alongside it. The GWR terminus is long-redundant, the tracks into it covered by the maintenance depot for Class 159 SWR trains.

“We are doing a master plan at the moment,” says Ardley, standing on part of a forlorn platform that hasn’t seen a passenger in living memory.

“We are looking at the potential use of this area behind the old GWR station. That is very much tied to what happens to the depot in the future.

“There are various options for the replacement of the ‘159s’. It could be that we still need the depot for a diesel fleet. But if we don’t, we will need less space over here. And we could use it in other ways, including a new northern entrance.

“It is a good site for car parking, and that would greatly strengthen the case for a northern entrance.

“We have an ambition to reopen Platform 1 and the buildings on it. We could see a link between the old GWR station and those buildings. I can imagine a scenario where this whole area becomes very different.

“The critical thing is the depot, and that depends on what replaces the diesel fleet.”

West of that depot is a Network Rail facility still known by locals as “the engine shed”, even though that is long gone.

One option is to make that home to (let’s speculate) repurposed, battery-adapted, mid-life Class 450s for use on third-rail discontinuous electrification to Exeter. That would free up land next to the station, and delight residents with less all-night noise from elderly diesels directly opposite their front doors.

Says Ardley: “If it’s a Class 450 with batteries, it will need to spend less time at a depot than a diesel train, and major maintenance would likely be done at Northam [in Southampton].

“Future capacity will drive this: how big the fleet will be, and how Salisbury will balance with facilities at Yeovil and Exeter.

“Beyond that, there is re-control of the signalling from here at Salisbury to Basingstoke. The signal box on the station will close. That’s due between 2029 and 2034. It’s not a full resignalling, but we want to improve things as a result of that - including reopening Platform 1.

“It would need additional points to tie into the main line, as it is mainly a depot reception road. But it would give us more flexibility if we are to have more services, more freight, and also better operational performance.”

Ardley elaborates: “When we have disruption, we quickly get stuck. We split and join a lot of trains here. And we use Salisbury as a railhead whenever there is disruption further down the West of England Line. We get customers off here, because further down the line there is no support for onward travel by road.

“We are looking at extending the Tisbury passing loop, and we are looking at Devon Metro services to Axminster - that would need an additional loop. Just extending Tisbury gains four minutes on the Exeter journey. And Pinhoe is the fastest-growing station on our network.

“If we go for battery-electric rolling stock, the infrastructure will take time, so we really need decisions. We are just putting the case together now to put to the Department for Transport and stakeholders.

“This will be the biggest change to this line in 35 years. The depot was built specifically for the old fleet.

“You don’t get many opportunities to improve so many bits of the jigsaw puzzle in one go. It will set up the next few decades - the infrastructure, the rolling stock, the bringing-back of part of this historic station that has been dormant. A once-in-a-generation opportunity for Salisbury.”

There may also be potential use for the former East Goods Yard between the station and Fisherton Tunnel - once-extensive, but little-used today.

It will be a temporary car park during the station redevelopment, while a new parking deck is constructed over the existing, frequently-full site beside the station’s west-facing bay Platform 5, which is not used by passengers. Beyond that, there are no plans.

Anna Jipps, of the Railway Heritage Trust, is excited about the potential.

“You walk along the platform, and you don’t even realise there is an old GWR station behind. There is so much wonderful heritage here,” she enthuses.

“The rooms on Platform 1, in particular, could come back to life. They could be retail space. That wonderful tiling could be restored. There may be something to be done with the GWR station, which is on a long lease to a club from Network Rail.

“Our interest is in bringing back old spaces to the operational railway, so this is exactly the sort of thing we could potentially give a grant towards.”

The most extraordinary discovery in this project has been a lost tunnel. Uncovered as part of redesigning the station forecourt, it has brought back a part of Salisbury folklore.

There were rumours of a secret underground route from the railway station to the nearby mental hospital on the Wilton Road.

Today it is retirement housing. Previously it was the Old Manor Hospital. But it was once Fisherton Asylum, the largest ‘mental institution’ in England, a place where wealthy families chose to hide their troubled relatives. At the time the railway arrived in Salisbury, it accepted ‘criminal lunatics’ - long before Broadmoor Hospital was established.

Could this be it?

Steep steps down to a brick-lined tunnel beneath the original LSWR station building were uncovered as the paving for a passenger pavement was relaid.

“Mental health was a taboo subject in Victorian times,” explains local historian Frogg Moody.

“The tunnel would have offered segregation. The fabled tunnel was meant to go from the railway to the asylum. Until we biff down the bricked-up wall in there, we will not know.”

There is no hard evidence to prove the link. It is perfectly possible that the tunnel merely ran from one side of the LSWR station to the other, or perhaps from there to the GWR station to permit the transfer of light goods.

“I would really like to believe it’s true,” says Moody.

“It would stop all the doubters. Personally, I think there was a tunnel to the asylum. But the evidence is not strong enough.

“My father worked at the hospital in the 1960s, and he told me of the tunnel. Patients mentioned it in the 1930s. Given the stories, it would be strange if there wasn’t one.”

SWR’s Andrew Ardley adds: “It needs further investigation. We think it links to some steps we’ve found underneath Platform 1. We believe it was used for moving things to the central island platforms. And we know it was used for signalling cables. But some of it remains a mystery. As far as we know, there is no historical record.”

Railway architecture historian Tim Dunn is unconvinced: “I have rarely seen evidence surviving of any tunnel for moving people from Building A to Building B, when there is no obvious reason for a tunnel to do so,” he says, after inspecting the tunnel.

“Most buildings of this time had cellars, and it may well have had access underneath the tracks. But there is no reason to have a hidden route to the asylum. The tunnel doesn’t really align with the asylum, but it does line up with the GWR station.”

Jipps confirms: “Nobody knows the real story. We looked at whether we could put some kind of clear covering over the tunnel hatch, so passengers could see down into it. SWR investigated, and that is not going to be possible.

“But we could put an interpretation board there. The fact that it’s a tunnel and we don’t know where it goes - it’s all very Enid Blyton!”

Salisbury’s crashes

There have been two big railway crashes near Salisbury station.

The most recent was on October 31 2021, when a South Western Railway train from Andover collided with a Great Western Railway service from Romsey as both headed towards the station at the entrance to Fisherton tunnel, just under a mile east of the platforms.

Thirteen passengers and the driver of the SWR train were injured. The line was closed for 16 days.

As RAIL reported extensively at the time, the late-running SWR service had failed to stop at a red signal, as a result of poor railhead adhesion at the peak of the autumn leaf fall season.

But by far the worst crash was on Sunday July 1 1906. A boat train from Plymouth passed through the station at more than twice the speed limit and crashed into a milk train, killing 28 people including the driver, two firemen and the guard. The other 24 were all Americans.

It was common for transatlantic liners to call briefly into Plymouth before heading to Southampton. Passengers in a hurry could catch a train from Plymouth to London instead, saving half a day.

The express service was travelling at 70mph on impact. The maximum permitted speed through the curved station was 30mph. More than a century later, the speed limit on the sharp curve east of the station is only 15mph.

The crash happened at night, just beyond the end of the platform.

Part of a wrecked goods wagon was left handing precariously over the parapet of the Fisherton Street bridge, and many Salisbury people came to help.

They earned a letter of gratitude from President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote: “I have heard so much of the generous care you have lavished upon the American sufferers in the lamentable train wreck, that I wish to write you a line of acknowledgement on behalf of our people. Thanking you from the bottom of my heart.”

The wreckage had to be cleared entirely by hand. Astonishingly, the railway reopened only 12 hours later.

A memorial stone in Salisbury Cathedral reads: “This tablet was erected by citizens of Salisbury as a pledge of brotherly sympathy with mourners in England, America and Canada, in memory of those who lost their lives through an accident on the railway within this city. It lists all those who died, including Driver W J Robins, Firemen Sidney Chick and Arthur Gadd, and guard C Chenneour.

The railway in Salisbury

Salisbury’s railway was a clash of 19th century Titans - a meeting and competing of the Great Western Railway and the London & South Western Railway.

They ended up with stations side-by-side - broad gauge against standard gauge. The resulting layout lasted right into the 1970s.

Even today, the battle is still visible in the city’s landscape. Bridges west of the station are wide and with separate structures, where GWR and LSWR tracks ran parallel for three miles to Wilton. There, each had a separate station, as they divided to head for Bath and Exeter.

But Salisbury’s first station was on the other side of the city. In 1847, an LSWR branch line arrived from Eastleigh to Milford, above today’s A36 Southampton Road.

Nine years later, GWR opened its station on a route south from Westbury.

Then came what we now call the West of England Line from Andover, initially to Milford.

Finally, the Fisherton tunnel brought the rival operators side-by-side, the small but elegant Brunel station building, and Sir William Tite’s design for a larger LSWR station.

That light brick building is still used as offices. The red brick building passengers know today was built in 1902.

From the LSWR platforms sprung the shortest branch line in the country. A quarter of a mile long, the Market House Branch ran into the city centre to the site of today’s library. A small bridge remains by the Central Car Park.

The former GWR lines survived right up to 1973. One platform was used for goods until 1991. Now the station is a club in non-railway hands, and SWR staff park their cars against the edge of the unnoticed platform behind it. In 1992, the sidings behind it became the SWR traincare depot, where Class 158 and 159 diesels are maintained.

The Milford station off the Southampton Road lasted until 1967 for freight, but is now an industrial estate, with only an 1847 pub to indicate its past opposite the coaling sidings. Uniquely, the single alehouse has two names - The Railway Inn and The Dust Hole.

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