The Cranleigh line was a railway line in England that connected Guildford in Surrey, with Horsham in West Sussex. Construction of the line was started by an independent company, the Horsham and Guildford Direct Railway, but management failures delayed construction, and the company was taken over by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR). The LBSCR completed the construction of the line and it was opened in 1865; it was nearly 16 miles in length.
At Guildford the trains relied on using the station and approach route of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR). There was competitive tension between the LSWR and the LBSCR, and at the time Guildford station was already congested, so that access negotiations were not easy. The hopes of the original promoters that the line would become a trunk route for traffic from the Midlands to the Sussex Coast were not fulfilled, and low usage due to the agricultural nature of the terrain the line served resulted in continuous financial losses.
When British Railways considered the future of loss-making services in the mid-1960s, the line came under scrutiny, and it was closed on 14 June 1965.
History
Before the Horsham and Guildford Direct Railway
The London and Brighton Railway opened its main line between those places in 1841, and had already opened a branch line, more simply constructed, to Shoreham in 1840. The London and Brighton Railway merged with other companies to form the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR) in 1846.
In 1848 the LBSCR built a branch line from Three Bridges, on the Brighton main line, to Horsham, then an insignificant town. There the railway remained for some years, during which Horsham grew in importance. The next development was the construction of the Mid-Sussex Railway, opened in 1859. At first the Mid-Sussex Railway was to link Horsham and Petworth, but it later became part of a main line connection between London and the South Coast.
In 1861 a line from Horsham to Shoreham was opened, known as the Steyning Line. This gave a link to Brighton, leaving the Mid-Sussex line at Itchingfield Junction, three miles south of Horsham.
Meanwhile, Guildford, as the county town of Surrey was already of considerable importance. The London and Southampton Railway opened its main line throughout in 1840 and had changed its name to the London and South Western Railway in 1839. It passed Guildford several miles away, to the north, with a station at Woking (at the time named Woking Common). A branch line to Guildford was opened in 1845, and this was extended to a Godalming station by a nominally independent company, opening in 1849. In addition, the LSWR opened a branch line from Guildford via Tongham to Farnham, also in 1849.
Another railway route opened in 1849, the Reading, Guildford and Reigate Railway. In the Guildford area it relied on running powers over the LSWR lines, from Shalford Junction south of Guildford, through Guildford station, and then as far as Ash Junction on the Farnham line. These running powers had been authorised by Parliament. The Reading Guildford and Reigate Railway was an affiliate of the South Eastern Railway (SER), whose main focus was from London into Kent and East Sussex. However the connection it now had to Reading gave the possibility of an alliance with the Great Western Railway, which ran through Reading on its main line between London and Bristol, with connecting lines to South Wales and (under construction) to the West Midlands.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, access to tidal water was a significant benefit to a population centre, enabling heavy materials to be brought in and taken away by coastal shipping. In the case of Guildford this had been achieved since 1816 by the Wey and Arun Canal. The canal proprietors saw that they were losing business to the railways and they decided that conversion of part of their canal to a railway would be worthwhile. The sixteen miles between Guildford and Pulborough could be converted for about £8,000 a mile, and would give access to the navigable section of the River Arun, and to the English Channel at Littlehampton. They met with the directors of the LBSCR in August 1859, evidently hoping for financial collaboration, but the LBSCR invited them to develop their idea into a more definite proposal. They failed to do so.